


rum and coke and flunitrazepam

by lapsi, robokittens



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Necrophilia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Season/Series 01, Serial Killer Fanboy Holden Ford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2019-09-22 01:58:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/robokittens/pseuds/robokittens
Summary: There’s a dead man in a suit drinking in the corner of the bar.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This reads exactly as morally reprehensible as the tags suggest. (In our defense, this is way less weird than if we wrote this kind of schmaltz about an actual serial killer.)
> 
> Credit/blame goes to robokittens, the concept of this fic forged in our mutual hell, plotted together in sinister congress. Specific wording by me; please do not hold them accountable for my inelegant prose.

 

 

 _(n)_  

 

There’s a dead man in a suit drinking in the corner of the bar.  
  
There’s enough crowd and movement that it isn’t entirely obvious that he’s here alone. But he is. The lights are always deliberately dimmed— to hide the shoddy basement flooring, the stains of dribbling pipes from the barely-more-respectable antique store above the bar. Painted bulbs cast an infernal haze over the occupants, most of whom benefit from the low lighting. I’m two drinks down, chatting up some saucer eyed, pretty face I recognize as belonging to a bar regular. Accordingly, a boy who cannot be killed. He’s losing interest in me, and I him. The suited man hasn’t even spoken to another patron. He ordered a drink across the bar, didn’t so much as glance in my direction, which was an annoyance. But not an insurmountable one. It’s entirely possible he thinks I’m too attractive for him to stand a chance at. Perhaps he thinks I’m not his type. He’d be wrong on that count. I’m any man’s type, one way or another. By choice. By force.

I don’t try to hide my interest now. An overly professional suit, though the first few buttons nestle open across his throat. Blue eyes are glazed yet completely steady as he continuously evaluates the room like some mindless automaton. It’s about the most attracted I’ve been to a victim before the act itself. I wonder if I’m watching depression, pharmaceutical abuse, an acquired brain injury. I buy two bourbon and cokes from the bartender and approach him. It’s a gay bar; not even a mentally deficient husk of a human could have missed the graffiti of a drag queen Marilyn Monroe, or the bartender in blue eyeshadow and reddish lace, or the two young women making a disgusting show of themselves necking in a not-dark-enough booth.

“Haven’t seen you here before,” I say, over the electronica reverie.

“I haven’t been here before,” he tells me. I detect engagement at long last: his eyes back and forth scan me, head to toe, like some kind of human fax machine chewing me up for replication. He’s taken me all in, and he loses interest again. He drinks his beer and looks behind me towards the bar.

I consider putting the glass right through his handsome, boyish face and watching him howl in agony and bleed all over the dark vinyl countertops— “You don’t seem to plan on coming back, judging by your current levels of excitement. And your drink is almost finished, so you might disappear off now, unless I get you started on a new one. And I’d very much like you to stay long enough that I can at least learn your name,” I say, sweet as can be.

“Holden. Holden Ford,” he says flatly, with no indication to accept the drink. A little slur on his lifeless voice. It was too natural to be a fake name, especially at this degree of intoxication. There are two empty shot glasses, and another three beers beside that. “…you come here a lot,” he tells me, about myself.

It’s true, yet it sounds decidedly condemnatory. Is he straight? Is he a cop? No, he’s too drunk to be a cop. And why the fuck would a straight man be getting drunk in this den of faggots and dykes and trannies? I jingle the offered drink, keep my inside joke casual: “It’s not spiked. Though if you come back to my place, I can sort you out for something that’d have you unconscious in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

Suddenly he’s so much less attractive. He’s alert. I imagine him loose-limbed with a slashed out throat, peeled out of that damned suit, and stop regretting the dollar and change I’m about to blow handing over this drink. He’ll look so much nicer with blueish palour of deadly blood loss.

“Flunitrazepam?” the kid asks, somehow correctly pronouncing the drug. I wonder how old he is. Twenty-five or six.

 _That is how I drug them, yes, Holden._ I do my best to hide my surprise at the coincidental overlap between this voluntary drug taker, and my other victims. A junkie means a higher dose, but my stash should hold out. I nod. To know the drug off the top of his head, a junkie, a pharmacist, or a doctor. Probably not a pharmacist, in that suit. Health insurance? He looks like he works in insurance. ...if he’s a doctor, I really want to kill him.

“What’s your name?” he asks, finally inspecting the pair of drinks in my hand. “…I don’t want drugs, by the way. I don’t do drugs. Well, my ex-girlfriend wanted me to try marijuana once but— anyway, I would like a drink.” God, he’s plastered. I’m acutely aroused by his sloppiness. I feel a twitch of interest at how close to drugged his manners are already. It’s been four months since my last murder; I usually leave a longer cool down period to avoid overzealous law enforcement. But sometimes you have to allow yourself an unanticipated pleasure. Holden is utterly unanticipated.

I set the mixed drink down beside his mostly finished beer. I suppose I should lie, but there’s little chance of him remembering this. And I do intend to kill him, so that’s a certain berth of practical anonymity. “Nick,” I inform him.

“Nick. Nicholas, I assume. That’s…” if Holden had been about contribute more to the conversation, he’s lost it. He’s squinting at my moustache, nodding to himself stupidly. And then he’s draining his beer, sliding the empty towards the graveyard of glassware. Already onto my purchase.

“Celebrating something, Holden?” I ask with one raised eyebrow.

“…I’m on probationary leave from my job. Now that you’re here, yeah. I’m celebrating.”

It’s the weakest attempt at flirting I’ve ever heard. If I wasn’t yearning to kill him so bad, I might walk away on principle. “Let me guess, your career is something with a medical slant.”

He regards me too long. Maybe a more sobered Holden is discerning, but my Holden is erotically sluggish. “Right. ‘Cause I know flunitrazepam. …sales.”

I wonder if he’s more of a people person when he’s not toeing the line of alcohol poisoning. This guy couldn’t sell me a life raft on the Titanic. ...maybe that’s why he’s on probationary leave. “A pharma rep? Bet that pays well. Maybe you should be buying me the drinks.”

“Paid okay,” Holden says and takes several long gulps. “Past tense. I’m as good as fired. Where’s your place?”

It’s so forward I’m almost not sure what to do with him. Take him back to my place, depress his system a fraction further, lay down some plastic sheeting, I suppose. “We can walk,” I say, and down the rest of the too strong drink. Killing is nicer with a light buzz, and this is only my third. “Sometimes undercovers watch this place. Watch for men leaving together, hoping to throw together an arrest just to keep us queers on our toes. I’m gonna leave. Wait a couple of minutes, then you follow. Up the stairs, turn left as soon as you exit. Walk a block, there’s a park. A park bench. I’ll be waiting for you, Holden,” I saw, as intensely as I can.

Despite the complete lack of attraction he was displaying earlier, now the suited man shivers. He’s imagining me fucking him. I’m imagining me fucking him, though I doubt there’s much more overlap than that in our two fantasies. I’m sure, in his fantasies, he’s breathing.

“Oh. …that’s clever, Nick,” he says, so rapt I know he’ll follow me anywhere. Too fast, I suspect. A blatant pursuit. But it’s a busy night, and if the police find any patrons willing to answer questions, which is already dubious, there will be no recollections of us leaving together. The slight staggering of our departures amongst the invigorated, drifting crowds will take care of that. The main staggering will be done by a very intoxicated Holden ascending the steps from the basement bar.  
  
I smile. He smiles, worse. Like some spasming stroke victim. I leave.

 

 

The unlit park is in a tandem crosswind, knocking the loose leaves around in dark loops. Reverberations spread throughout the spectral shapes of indistinct foliage. I ignore the park bench I claimed I’d wait for him on, and climb a set of concrete steps. The night air is bracing, exciting. I stare at the few visible stars. I wait. I wait a long time.

 

 

He could be mistaken for an aimlessly wandering drunkard, but I can establish the grid pattern of Holden Ford’s search from my bird’s eye view. I descend the steps, one-by-one, planting my boots gradually into the concrete steps. Measured, predatory, quiet. I lose Holden as he moves behind a hedge. I step off the staircase onto the grass to stalk him the last few feet. I could kill him right now, but I have no real desire to rush what could be a decadently private act. Still, it does occur to me that I could get right behind him in this state, watch him startle away, a hand over the mouth. I usually don’t have much trouble subduing them, but then again, usually it’s not only alcohol in their system.

“Got lost en route?” I ask and he startles and cranes his neck to look up at me. I’m taller than him; at 6’5”, I’m taller than almost everyone. Yet I enjoy this inevitable moment of comparison almost every time. A moment where we stand on even ground, and they have the first subconscious flickering awareness that if it came down to it I am physically capable of—

“You said to wait a couple of minutes,” he says, checks his watch. A nice watch. It would make a good trophy. I can detect the start of a pout even in the blue-black of night. His lips aren’t very full, but they have a pleasantly youthful quirk to them. A little girl denied what she wants.  
  
“You found someone interesting to talk to on the way out, didn’t you, Holden?” I ask reproachfully.  
  
“You said to wait a couple of minutes. I talked to the bartender to buy my drinks. I talked to you. Nobody else. I don’t know anyone there.”  
  
The reassurance is strange. Like he _knows_ I’m trying to isolate him from potential witnesses. He thinks I’m paranoid about police, I tell myself. If he thought I was dangerous, he wouldn’t have followed me out here into the night.  
  
I walk two steps, lay a hand on the small of his back. Use it to steer him down the footpath. He’s wearing a thin, equally characterless overcoat. I’m glad I can’t feel the heat of his body beneath it, but I have to knock it aside. A test of responsiveness: I put my hand underneath his suit jacket, cup his hip and then his ass. He drank with his right hand, so a holster would be crossdraw. Nothing there, nothing tucked into his waistband. My hand roams clenched up flesh. He is frigid as a nun. But he’s not armed.  
  
“Ever been with a guy?” I ask, even though I don’t have to ask. Shit, probably his first time with anyone. Seems virginally stilted, even this fucking plastered.  
  
He coughs with shock, which serves as a ‘no’. There’s something pitiable about this boy dying a virgin, or at least, dying without sex he actually wants. But I’m not a charity worker.  
  
I shrug, put my hands into the pockets of my leather jacket again as I turn away. “Keep up,” I say, and he does. Through the gusting, rustling park. Down one of quieter streets, then the alleyway that leads to my apartment block. I take him in through the parking entrance, and then beeline for my front door. If someone sees me with him, I’ll have to let him go. A risk not worth taking, as murderable as this boy is. But the corridor is thankfully vacant. He’s stumbling, and I put a hand on his waist. He tenses, strung out and tuned sharp.  
  
And then inside, as always, I am charming. “Sorry. I got harassed by some undercover a couple of weeks ago, and— well, I’ve got weed here, even if they don’t get me—” I realize that my usual apologetic spiel is completely unnecessary. Holden didn’t care that I treated him like an oft-whipped dog.  
  
His eyes are wandering fascinated over the interior of my apartment, as if he’s drunkenly meandered into the fucking Louvre. They settle first on the guitar, then my record collection. He starts at the top, which is my most recent purchases: lifts up ‘Rattus Norvegicus’. I can see lips twitching through the syllables, maybe wondering if he’s too drunk to ascertain meaning. Then ‘Before and After Science’, Brian Eno. ‘Pink Flag’, Wire. _Good choice, Holden. Very wall of sound. Drown out any struggle you put up._ I step close, and take that record out of his clumsy fingers.  
  
“You heard it, yet?”  
  
He shakes his head.  
  
“What sort of music do you like, Holden?”  
  
A blank, whiskey-plied stare.  
  
Why am I wasting sleeping pills on this barely animate corpse? “Why don’t you sit down?” I say, flicking the player on. One crooked finger to steer the tonearm into position, bringing the machine to life. Sound seeps into my small lounge. I adjust the volume: loud, but not noise complaint loud. It’s not a good neighborhood, and I would be unlucky to receive police attention even if Holden started screaming his own bloody murder. But nobody ever sat in a jail cell regretting their caution.  
  
He slumps into my cushiony leather couch, a clay-toned expanse that’s cracking dry in the corners. The banks of the Mississippi in summer.  
  
“Would you like a drink?” I ask, already stepping away to fetch him one. He’ll imbibe anything I put on that coffee table in front of him.  
  
I see the barest twitch of a nod in my peripheral vision.  
  
The sleeping pills are in a jar on my spice rack. Only seven left, though these are two milligram tablets as opposed to my usual one milligrams. The dealer I bought them from is a polite young latino man who I would love to someday kill. Unfortunately, he’s too reliable to lose. I still test each new batch, which means passing out alone, waking up wrapped in a benzodiazepine smog. But when I’m crushing the round white pill under a glass, it’s with full confidence in my product. The bench conveniently faces in the direction of the lit doorway; I’d see his shadow coming well before Holden stumbled through. I sweep the powder carefully off the faux-wood-panel counter and into a glass, mixing in a only a little whiskey (don’t want him actually vomiting up the drugs) and then adding ice and coca cola. I stir his with a teaspoon, quiet even though the music would drown out the glass tinkling of ice cubes.  
  
“ _Raaa-aa-aape. Rape_ ,” Colin Newman tonelessly accuses through my speaker system. I love this song.  
  
My hair is falling into my eyes. I sweep it to one one side before I pick up the two drinks. Their drink is always in my left hand. It pays to stick to routines, in situations such as this. I step back through to the lounge and find my well-trod routine missing a crucial component. My victim is not on my couch. I glance towards the bathroom— door open, lights off— and then I see my bedroom door issuing telltale illumination. I suck down a steadying breath. I want to see him naked, sure, but preferably only after he’s dead. I don’t want him expecting sexual performance. No, I’ll be able to talk him into the drink. And then he’ll get sleepy, and I’ll find him much more attractive as his consciousness is failing one final time.  
  
I push the door in but he’s not on my bed. He’s not even undressed, he’s— he’s at my dresser. Over my collection. Personal items from my victims: three rings (one of them a wedding band), two watches, a US flag patch I cut off a denim jacket, a zippo embossed with a pair of swans in a love heart. And, the heavy silver and turquoise crucifix that Holden is holding up to his throat. He’s gazing at himself in the small oval mirror atop the dresser. I loved that necklace that I took from around the neck of a dead boy. It reminded me of Catholic school. But I don’t like it on Holden.  
  
My entire house, and he went straight for my trophies. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling into terrified attention. I want to put down the drinks and go for the knife in my nightstand, but I find myself uncharacteristically frozen. He’s noticed me, of course, but he doesn’t look.  
  
“You know, it’s impolite to go through people’s things,” I tell him, calmly as I can wrangle my own voice.  
  
He finally looks over at me, unafraid, unashamed. It occurs to me now, he may have been playing up his intoxication. He slurs, yet the words are honed to a point: “These aren’t yours, Nick.”  
  
I can hear ice cubes rattling in the glasses in my hand. I’m betrayed by my own adrenal system.  
  
And then he puts down the crucifix onto dark wood. He extends his empty hand needily towards me, grasping gracelessly as a newborn child. “Which one’s mine? It _does_ have the flunitrazepam in it, doesn’t it? I know you have sex with your victims, and I’d prefer to be unconscious. I’m not a queer.”  
  
I try to sound dumbfounded. Which, I am. “...what on earth are you--”  
  
“I’m not LE,” he interrupts me reassuringly. “Not any more. Don’t you think, if I was going to arrest you, I would have done it earlier? I’m a little at your mercy now, aren’t I?” he gestures to his setting. I try to tell myself that he’s right, but I feel like _his_ prey.  
  
I keep the drink out of his reach, the only modicum of control I feel I have left. “Why did you come here…?”  
  
He closes an empty hand, the loose fist wavering. He _is_ drunk. Very drunk. Drunk and smirking like a Caravaggio angel. “I want you to murder me, Nick.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I've tried to make my terrible, miserable brain write something, or want to write something for like six months. And finally it spits out the worst thing in the world. Sorry, universe. Some people have expressed that they'd read more of this, so, uh, here)

This willing surrender sounds all wrong. It’s smugly satisfied-- the tone you’d expect from someone finally unveiling a now unavoidable chess gambit. The shaking drinks in my hand continue to sing out a shrill betrayal of my shock. I set them down on the dresser. By my trophies. All jumbled by greedy, prying fingers. My hand skates out, a passing attempt to order them again. “Are you wearing a wire?” I ask very quietly.  
  
“That’s what you patted me down for earlier,” he tells me, as if reminding me of something very obvious.   
  
_No, idiot. I thought maybe you were armed._ Still hasn’t answered the question at hand. “But you are undercover.” Even as I say it, the inconsistencies avail themselves to me: here alone with me, in immediate danger, clearly intoxicated, with this crazy fucking story? Why not make a break for it after he’d found my collection of mementos? One trial exhibit of that collection and my seat for Thanksgiving would be an electric chair. I’d be a body before this Christmas.   
  
Holden seems to think about the same of my assertion. There’s a flickering, dark microexpression. Offence? Annoyance? Boredom? “I _was_ FBI. I’m not any more. I’m not undercover-- I’m not-- I don’t do that anymore.” He blinks, hard, inward pressure. Trying to sober himself up, if I had to guess. “You’re in the clear.”   
  
“Name?” I growl, stepping closer. It barely sounds like a word, even to me. The indecipherable snarl of a caged predator. “Your name,” I clarify. That was closer to human self-expression.   
  
“You don’t need to stress, Nick. Ask me whatever you want. ...would it make this easier, if you had a weapon and I were unarmed? I want to make this easy for you.”   
  
“Then make it fucking easy. Tell me what your name--”   
  
“My name is Holden Ford. I already told you. May I take out my wallet?” he asks. Polite and reassuring, as if I’m an arresting officer at a traffic stop. Like he’s a drunk driver. A _really_ drunk driver.   
  
Three steps, and I’m at my bedside table, never turning fully away from the swaying young man. He’s watching me too, in the mirror, as he nestles the crucifix back amongst my collection. And somehow, despite the drunken blinking, he managed to be hawkish.   
  
The knife is instantly soothing to the touch. I pry it from the small ledge I carved out on the table’s underside. Not a concealment that would stand up to LE turning the place over, but I don’t want my boys predicting my planned finale. And I certainly don’t want them finding anything to fight back with. 

It’s a fold-out hunting blade, several inches of mildly curving stainless steel, a hooked point. I sharpened it after my last kill; I always sharpen it after a kill. Part of the decompression routine, as I retreat from that frenzied reverie. My stress is again significantly reduced when I have a handful of the alleged FBI agent’s hair, and the blade finds the pulsing skin barely concealing his external carotid. He doesn’t fight, doesn’t startle, doesn’t move at all.  
  
His neck looks intoxicating contrasted with a knife. In the mirror, I watch his Adam’s apple oscillate beside the shiny-bright blade. I hope that’s fear. I see him watching me back.   
  
“So your name is really Holden Ford?” I ask softly, against the too-warm shell of his left ear. “You’re being honest with me, now?”   
  
His left hand reaches into a back pocket, pulling out his wallet. I feel the nudge against my hip, despite my attempt to avoid body-to-body contact. The back of his hand. Mobile, warm. Viscerally repulsive. My knife at his throat presents a swift solution to his vitality-- but before I instinctually follow through, he’s flipped the leather open onto the dresser’s surface.   
  
“Holden Ford,” he says, again. There’s something like shame in those syllables. I squint at the driver’s license in the afternoon-yellow glow of my ancient overhead light. He looks even less like a real person in that picture.   
  
“And you worked for the FBI?” I ask, feigning composure.   
  
“I did. In the Behavioural Science Unit. I wrote a psychological profile on your crimes at the behest of Arlington PD. Well, some of your crimes. I’m certain there are earlier crimes, perhaps interstate. But Jacob Wentworth, and Anton Hay, and Walter--” my eyes must widen at the names of previous victims so casually rattled out, because he stops speaking. “Don’t worry; the profile was fairly accurate, but I put in a lot of legwork too,” he tells me. Is he worried about spooking me? “Can I have that drink, please, Nick?” he entreats me, fingers tripping soft over the wooden cabinet towards where the rum and coke, and rum and coke and flunitrazepam sit, hazed with condensation.   
  
I wrench at his short hair and Holden startles. There’s a shaky, shocked exhale as he lowers his fingers away from the drugged beverage. He’s not used to pain. That’ll make it easier to get answers out of him. “Both palms, flat on the dresser,” I order. I usually enjoy ordering them around, but this isn't reasserting my sense of control.   
  
He obeys without hesitation.   
  
I give up the uncompromising handful of hair, though I keep the knife at his throat. Fingers wander, more thoroughly, over his chest, down his front, feeling for the wire he denied wearing. Then, his pockets, one by one. I turn out keys, a couple of coins, drop them unceremoniously onto the dresser where Holden Ford’s worldly possessions blemish my beloved trophy collection. The man before me is shivering, but I don’t think he’s hard. I’d have to stop touching him, if he were responding in _that_ way.   
  
His voice is rough with intoxication, or maybe excitement, as I slip around the circumference of his waistband: “You know that, if I was part of a sting, they would have burst through the door long ago, Nick. I’m currently in mortal danger.”   
  
It sounds eerily like sweet-talk, and I don’t care for that. “Shut the fuck up,” I growl. I break contact with the ugly, soft burn of living skin. “Okay. We’re going downstairs. You’re gonna be nice and quiet. Walk in front of me, but slowly.”   
  
He looks around my bedroom, tucking his shirt back in. Seems bemused, even put out. “I thought you killed them up here,” he mutters, almost to himself.   
  
I pocket his wallet. “I told you to shut up. You make any sound and I’ll--”   
  
“Kill me?” Holden asks in an odd tone. Is he trying to be fucking funny? “How about this? If I cooperate, you’ll kill me.”   
  
I stare at him in the mirror for a long time, lost for words. I compose the reflection I see. Merciless and inarguable. “I promise I’ll kill you.”   
  
Holden looks like he’s going to smile. He inclines his head as much as the knife at his throat allows. “Still a good negotiator,” he says softly, again to nobody in particular. “You should bring the pills, I don’t want--”   
  
“I don’t care what you want.”   
  
“I don’t care what you want either,” he retaliates. If I were in a better mood, I might find the bluntness endearing. “You should bring the pills,” he repeats. “It would be mutually beneficial. I don’t want to fight you, but I will. I’m not interested in having sex with you.”   
  
I don’t appreciate that comment. My knife presses in, bending malleable, vulnerable skin around the thin contact of stainless steel. I could draw blood now-- maybe even finish him off-- but then, he’d scream and I hate screaming-- and besides, there’s some profile of me sitting in an FBI filing cabinet, and I need to know how to keep myself safe--   
  
“Like I said. Mutually beneficial,” he reaffirms, rousing me from my frantic calculation. Actually smiling, now, the bastard. I reluctantly lower the knife from his throat. I hate that he’s able to dictate even this triviality, but he’s well-reasoned. And he does seem to, sincerely, want to be murdered.

 

 

The thrashing cacophony of ‘Pink Flag’ was soothingly invasive only a minute ago. Now, I deviate from Holden’s unsteady stumbling to jab the power switch on my record player. Then the absence makes the apartment hideously silent.  
  
As we walk past my kitchen, I catch a shoulder and push him into the wall beside the refrigerator. Furthest from my knife rack. Probably more force than I needed to exert, but it’s reassuring to see him lurching into the faux-marble tiling, catching himself on a splayed hand. I trap him in my unwavering stare as I blindly grope through my spice rack behind me, shaking the glass bottles and listening for the rattle of pills. Holden dips his head a fraction, watching me out of the corner of his eye, body still turned into the wall. From what I can see, he’s threatening to resume smiling. His neck twists the other way, to inspect the hallway--   
  
“You want to try to run?” I ask. I hope I sound excited by the prospect of a chase. I’m not. I just turned off the music that would have covered up a struggle. This is why I need structure; planning; routine.   
  
“Good set-up,” Holden remarks, as if evaluating my interior decor. But I know, at once, what he’s talking about. “Line of sight on the hallway, so they don’t catch you mixing anything into their drinks. This neighbourhood is good too. Well, not _good_ , not by any stretch of a realtor’s aggrandizing spiel-- I mean, people mind their own business in neighbourhoods like this one. And that staggered exit was so clever. ...tidy operation you have here, Nick.”   
  
It’s strange to hear a compliment that I’ve only ever entertained in moments of self-congratulation. I’m not flattered, though. I feel violated by this man’s pseudo-professional evaluation of me. I also hate that he knows my name. It’s a level of personal connection I am not ready to have with a living man. I pull him off the wall by the material of his suit jacket between his shoulders, and shove him towards the door. He’s very pliant physically, but it doesn’t make up for his blithe response to attempts at intimidation.   
  
He walks ahead of me, less sway to his step than on the way in. _Bastard was playing it up._ I lock the apartment door clumsily, unwilling to cease my nervous surveillance. The same route we took in, we take out. To the flickering, barely illuminated parking lot. He stops there. I stalk over to my car, listening for his footsteps to follow. I watch him through the windshield as he meanders over to the passenger side. I could swear he checks my number plate as he’s passing. I drum impatiently on the wheel and start the car the moment he’s inside, car door yet unclosed. He looks my way with eyebrows raised; admonishment, perhaps.   
  
I pull towards the exit slowly, reminding myself how catastrophic an accident would be right now. _Imagine this is a disposal trip, and you have a body with you._...by some measure, I do.

 

 

I’m too focused on potential witnesses in the shadowy corners of the apartment parking lot to notice my light-fingered passenger starting in on my glove compartment. By the time I hear the rustling, and reach over to slam it shut, he’s holding my vehicle registration towards the meagre moonlight. Holden’s intense, bloodshot eyes shine horrifying bright. He is steeped in ambiguous darkness, but I can see the upper lip move. He’s half-mouthing, half-whispering my name: ‘Nicholas Napier’.  
  
I repress a waking hypnic jerk, hearing a victim utter my full name. “Give that to me,” I growl, trying to take my documents from him without crashing the car.  
  
Holden Ford folds the vehicle registration into my hand readily enough, but with a distinct attitude now. He leans back in his seat, lashes fluttering. Eyes shut, he speaks. “Relax. If they don’t want my help catching serial killers, they can figure Nick Napier’s identity out for themselves. I’m not going to be in any position to tattle, am I?”  
  
I toss the registration towards the back seats, controlling my breathing. Holden’s reassurance is a powerful one; he’s going to be dead in a handful of hours. Holden Ford and I are too intimately acquainted at present, sure, but this is decidedly temporary. “...what did you call me? A ‘serial killer’?” I ask, unable to fully suppress my thrill as I try out the new phrase. ‘ _Serial killer’._ It sounds terrifying. Accomplished. Unstoppable. Too late I remember to be cold and removed and unknowable.  
  
“Academic lexicon to classify killers like you,” Holden explains, without even the common courtesy to open his eyes and look at me. “Serial, as in, distinct and repeating patterns of murder. Methodical, rather than spree killing, or mass killing. It’s what we use-- used-- I was part of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit. Bill and I--” Holden trails off. His eyes are not just shut any more, they are screwed tightly closed. “We’re the ones who would have caught you, Nick Napier,” he says, eventually.  
  
“But you didn’t catch me.”  
  
He scoffs low in his throat, gesturing laxly across to where I sit mere inches from him.  
  
I hear my attempt to reassure myself, before I can consciously veto the impression of insecurity: “You’re here, at my mercy.”  
  
Holden doesn’t reply to that for a long time. His eyes reopen, and I’m relieved to see a familiar lifelessness in them. “Yes. It took me some dedicated work to be at your mercy. I spent a lot of time in a lot of bars. Gay bars, or ...what would you call them? Amenable to that sort of thing. Accepting. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Nick.”  
  
I catch myself staring. “When I offered you the drink, you didn’t think I was ...the one,” I say. “What were you looking for?”  
  
He’s interested in me, again. Likes that I have a functional brain. “...I thought you’d be more overtly closeted. But the way you present yourself is--” he shrugs.  
  
“Is what?”  
  
“Ostentatious?” he hazards, eyes travelling up my clothing, resting too long on my leather jacket. “And I thought…” he purses his lips. He continues to evaluate me dispassionately. I feel like a frozen specimen under a laboratory microscope. “But my profile was right on all other counts,” he concludes.  
  
I can feel a knot forming in my stomach that I’m not even sure killing Holden could fix. The existence of some fucking file describing me is bad enough, but Holden is sitting right here proving that the FBI could find me if they were willing to slum it with dive bar surveillance. “...and you thought...? I dress too well, and _what?_ ”  
  
“...I expected you to have a more commonplace ...physical appearance,” he says, though now he seems cagey.  
  
“And what’s a commonplace appearance, Holden Ford? At a ‘gay bar’? Leather chaps and a mesh shirt?” I scoff.  
  
“I wouldn’t know,” he says, primly. He reconsiders. “Well, the ones I’ve been to, everyone dresses…”  
  
“Less like a Bible salesman than you?” I ask bitterly.  
  
Holden actually seems offended by this indictment of his outfit choice. “Some of your other victims disappeared coming straight from places of employment. I thought your range would include men wearing suits. ...I don’t really need to point out that I was correct about that, do I? You picked me up. And anyway, I didn’t mean commonplace appearance for a gay bar. You’re very tall. ...Ed is, too, so I suppose I of all people should-- and the very distinctive facial hair. ...but, again, Ed--”  
  
“Who the fuck is Ed?” I ask, cutting off the drunken babble.  
  
“Oh, the Co-Ed Killer. ...Edmund Kemper. I studied him, when I had a job, when I studied people.”  
  
I think he’s expecting me to be impressed. I have no idea who he’s talking about. “All ‘serial killers’ are tall and have facial hair. Don’t they teach you anything at Quantico?” I say, before I realise I’m cracking wise with a victim.  
  
He stares for a second, and then there’s a weird shuddering exhale that I suppose must be a chuckle. He neatens his hair, then a non-existent tie. “I thought you’d look more average, less remarkable. It would better explain nobody remembering who the victims left with.”  
  
“I’m careful,” I inform him. “I go late. Don’t make conversations I don’t have to. Use staggered exits because two people leaving together always draws some sort of attention. Sometimes I see them in the bar, but they have friends or it’s too crowded or too quiet to isolate them. I wait for them to leave, and if they leave alone I follow at a distance and introduce myself on the street where there’s nobody watching. ...besides, nobody in those bars wants to talk to the police.”  
  
“Trust me, I know.”  
  
I blink with surprise I shouldn’t feel. _Of course you do._ I’m still enduring the uncomfortable sensation of being prey rather than predator. I begin to covertly inspect myself in the rearview. “Be more remarkable if I was clean-shaven in one of those bars, anyway,” I tell him, or perhaps myself, under my breath.  
  
“I don’t predict facial hair in my profiles,” he says snidely. “Obviously.” He’s staring at the road unseeing, lips twitching. He’s trying to think his way past intoxication. I’ve been there, many times. “Profiling deals with the general. The statistical. I described you as having unremarkable appearance. I knew they went with you voluntarily, so you couldn’t have been... completely physically unattractive to those men you went with. But I anticipated… that you offered them inducement that might motivate them more than physical desire would. Drugs, or… more drinks, I mean, you offered drugs to me--”  
  
“As a joke,” I interject before I can help myself. “They always come with me willingly. Always.”  
  
He frowns at the road ahead, deep in thought. I have the distinct feeling he’s psychoanalysing me. “Often killers who seek to dominate and possess their victims as thoroughly as you do are expressing insecurity and frustration. Especially sexual. So, I thought you would be less confident in yourself. And then there’s the lack of eye-witnesses. You’re very noticeable. Tall, striking. You’ve been lucky in that regard, that’s all. It’s bad data,” he finally remarks.  
  
“No, I’ve been smart and cautious enough to keep the FBI in the dark.”  
  
“Yes. Well done on avoiding the FBI, Nicholas Napier,” Holden says flippantly.  
  
I consider hitting him. ...stabbing him. I have my knife. But I’m driving. And the conversation doesn’t feel done. “So I’m ‘striking’?” I ask, concealing any latent anger from my tone.  
  
Holden doesn’t look over.  
  
I give him my best, cocky grin. “So you’re closeted, huh?”  
  
“I’m not attracted to men,” he replies in a clipped tone.  
  
I laugh dismissively as I check the rearview. “Don’t worry. I’ll take your secret to your grave, Holden.”  
  
He makes an unamused face at me, too familiar for comfort. Yet I find myself privately smiling as I pull out off the side street and into the dribs and drabs of main road nocturnal traffic.  
  
“So. Where are we going? Where do you kill them?” Holden asks after several minutes of mercifully silent, northbound driving.  
  
_Them? Makes it sound as if you’re not among their number, Holden._ I let him stew a while before I tell him. “At my apartment. You were correct. Clever little FBI agent you used to be.”  
  
“So where are you taking _me_?” Holden asks, the first note of alarm entering his voice. At the suggestion that he might not be going to his own death, of all things.  
  
“We're going to have coffee. Somewhere out of my neck of the woods, where there’s no chance of being recognized. FBI, that’s-- that’s Quantico, right? So, giving that a wide berth.”  
  
“Yes, Quantico,” Holden says, stilted. “What’s the coffee for?”  
  
“To keep you attentive while you explain my ‘psychological profile’ to me in detail. Give me some pointers on how to avoid law enforcement detection in future. Then, Holden, I promise I’ll kill you.”  
  
I hear more wet swallows from beside me, but I don’t look at my passenger. “Can I hold the sedatives?”  
  
“You’re not going to cooperate for me, Holden?”  
  
The pitch of his voice has risen, constricted. “I want to be unconscious before--”  
  
“Okay, take it easy,” I cut him off. “...I don’t have sex with my boys while they’re alive. So you can stop worrying your pretty little head about that.”  
  
I can’t keep myself from studying his reaction. Lips parting sticky, dehydrated from all the alcohol. Pink. A nicer colour would be white. Or a pretty, livid lavender. Holden Ford is going to look so handsome once he’s dead.  
  
“I-- uhm--” He’s getting all virginal on me again, avoiding looking my way. “Okay,” he says, shifting around in the passenger seat. Telling a victim that I plan on fucking his corpse is a fresh thrill. I want to touch him, and see if he flinches. But I don’t want to have to touch him any more than I have to while he’s still alive. ...I think. A sign to the right reads “Purcellville Family Diner” (and more importantly, in flashing red beneath, “24 hours”) and I pull to the curb despite the presumably dismal offering. Holden is sitting transfixed. Unable to help myself, I reach over to my captive passenger. He twitches back, but cannot avoid me entirely. The power is euphoric.  
  
“Too late to be so put-together,” I tell him condescendingly. “Don’t want to be drawing attention, do you?” I loosen another button, managing to avoid warm skin. Then, bracing myself, a card fingers through his hair to knock it out of the stupid boyscout neatness. I can see he stops breathing while I’m touching him. The reaction tumbles through my mind over and over as I exit the car. Some weak shade of how, post-murder, I will replay every flicker of blood and twist of flesh and moment of domination. I think Holden’s will be something special. Holden is something special-- at least he will be. Once he’s dead.

 

  
  
He still sticks out in his dress shirt and dark slacks in the twenty-four hour diner. There’s only one other table open, college kids by the look. A part of town I’ve driven through only once before, when I was buying a box of second-hand jazz records from a classified listing, but I think there’s a college campus somewhere in the vicinity. Never been inside this particular establishment, with good reason. But quality of food is hardly a critical concern at this particular juncture. I order two coffees, and eggs and bacon for myself; Holden doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t so much as glance at his coffee-flecked paper menu. I feel we’re in agreement here. It would be wasteful to feed something that’s going to die so soon. The state might hand out last meals, but I don’t need to reassure my conscience with a similar, hollow displays of beneficence.   
  
I wait until there’s a berth of solitude before I lean in. “The profile. The one you used to track me down. Could you remove it from FBI offices--”   
  
He affects a barely perfunctory display of guilt. As a performer of emotions, I’m irritated by his lack of effort. “It’s already with local PD. Anyway, it would provoke more suspicion should it go missing,” he tells me. “It’s an active investigation.”   
  
I drum on the cheap-disinfectant-sticky table between us. Coffee comes. I slide his pointedly across; he’s flagging and I’m not done with him yet.   
  
He keeps bowing his head to inspect his own clasped hands. “Don’t worry, Nick. Nobody’s going to be referencing the work of disgraced profiler Holden Ford,” he says softly, once the waitress has departed. He drinks his coffee in gulps, fingers still unsteady. Doe eyes begging for forgiveness over the white rim.   
  
I like how he looks. A lot. The only thing I like about him, I tell myself.   
  
There won’t be anything except physicality soon.   
  
Should I sleep first? Find us a motel, tie Holden up in case of last minute jitters, get a decent night’s sleep and have the chance to truly luxuriate in the act. A moderately cooperative victim means I could take him somewhere very private without any trouble. ...somewhere special.

Holden’s lips part in anticipation of a question; I’m distracted, and he catches me off-guard: “So, how old were you when you killed your first victim? Did other crimes precede it?”  
  
“Jealous you’re not going to be my first, are you?”  
  
Not even the vaguest twitch of annoyance. The mask-- a young, innocent, benignly handsome man-- remains fixed. The lights of the parking lots are wet, red blooms across the pale blue eyes. The coffee seems to have worked, or perhaps, the discussion of violence. He seems magnetically drawn to me, leaning in, attention undivided. “Professionally curious, Nick.”  
  
I weigh up the implications of answering. In the end, I think I just want the experience of confession. You can take the kid out of Catholic school, or something. “Other crimes preceded it.”  
  
“What crimes--” Holden starts, stops when the waitress approaches. She settles down my late night feast. ...that can’t be right. I check the clock,  Early morning feast? Shit, I’d better get that motel room after all. Holden’s eyes are drawn to the slightly steaming pile of breakfast food. Hungry, maybe. Hasn’t made any effort to order food, if that’s the case.  
  
I start eating.  
  
“...when did you begin to engage in necrophilia with your victims?” Holden asks unbelievably casually.  
  
I struggle to swallow the mouthful of scrambled eggs, follow it down with a clearing gulp of coffee. “I see why you got fired. You’re not very good at this. You should ease into the personal questions.”  
  
“Am I making you uncomfortable, Nick?”  
  
_Yes. But two can play at that game._ “Are you a virgin, Holden?” I ask, over-emphasizing his name. I know what he’s doing with all this engaged pleasantness and first names and bedroom-eyes.  
  
He answers swiftly and without pause for thought: “No.”  
  
“You’re lying.”  
  
Holden blinks placidly. “My girlfriend dumped me the day before I lost my job,” he says, which isn’t what I asked.  
  
I let my retaliatory interrogation lapse, out of curiosity. “She figure out you were a closet case?”  
  
“The sex was fine. ...more than fine, on occasion, according to Debbie,” he says, swigging back his coffee now. There’s a new challenge in his steady eye contact. “Suffice it to say, I don’t think she was dissatisfied in that regard.”  
  
I think he’s lying, but the assertion I won’t be Holden’s first still annoys me. “You imagine being murdered to get it up?”  
  
“No. One time I was thinking about-- not me being murdered, but-- my work. And I couldn’t,” he tells me, a slight frown line forming. “Why do you ask? When you have sex with living men, do you fall back on memories of--”  
  
“I don’t do that,” I say sharply, and then feel inexplicably uncomfortable about the admission of my inflexible preferences. “I could. If I wanted to,” I say, which might be true. “But I don’t want to.”  
  
“I’m sure you could. If you wanted to,” Holden reassures me. “You’re a good-looking man, Nick. So, you’ve ...never had sex with a living man? Or woman?”  
  
“ _Woman_ ,” I scoff. I want to hit him, but now that I’m freed up from driving, we’re in public. “So this is your schtick, huh? You go in there and flatter people into confession? Jesus, someone paid you to do this?”  
  
He nods, expression unwaveringly receptive. “When did you first realise that you were a necrophile, Nick? Do you know the approximate age?”  
  
“Twelve, thirteen, maybe. I was pretty sexually advanced. I wasn’t--” I interrupt a question I see formulating. “I wasn’t interfered with, if that’s what you’re about to ask. I was sexually advanced on my own terms.”  
  
“Sexually advanced meaning that your development of intricate fantasies came far earlier than your peers, or that you were sexually active younger than most of your peers?”  
  
“Column A, Column B,” I say, and shrugs. I go back to eating between sentences, lapsing into leisurely exposition. “I was smarter than my peers. I bet every grade school psycho thinks the same of themself, but shit, I was. When I actually showed up to class or handed in work, they’d try to transfer me to specialised, advanced classes. College prep kinda thing. There was one proto-hippie counselor who slipped through the cracks of the hardline nuns who staffed Sacred Heart Boys School. ...I think she was a nun, too, but she was-- she thought I was a misunderstood genius, and if I had challenging work I would be applying myself--” I stop talking perhaps too abruptly when I realise how much I’m divulging. _Holden fucking Ford._ But I can’t let him know that he’s got under my skin, so that means not clamming up. Act like sharing this stuff isn’t a big deal. _Fucking manipulative FBI psych bullshit_. “Wasn’t true. I didn’t want more challenging work. I was interested in, shall we say, extracurricular activities. But I was smarter than my peers, and I was ahead of them in other ways. Started rebelling earlier. Started drinking before than anyone in my classes. Realised I was attracted to men before most of ‘em had even gone hunting through the basement for their dad’s skin mags.” I take a gulp of coffee. “...realised I wasn’t attracted to living men.”  
  
Holden is quiet for a long time, cradling his empty coffee. He's trying to bait me into continuing. I focus on my category-challenging 3 AM meal.  
  
“What do you do, Nick? For work?” he finally breaks the silence to ask.  
  
The seemingly irrelevant question annoys me. It’s like he’s not even listening to the interesting stuff. “...I work as a paramedic.”  
  
“Do you enjoy your work? You like watching the death?”  
  
_No. Yes._ “It’s fine. Flexible. Easy. I went to med school, but the work-life balance conflicts my real passions. I can take shifts when I want to, and when I have more important things-- you look surprised, Holden.”  
  
“I-- you went to med school?”  
  
“Pre-med, then onto med. Through most of my placements when I decided it wasn’t going to work for me,” I say, pleased against my will at having thrown Holden. Is he impressed? Was this not in the profile?  
  
The perplexed quirk of his mouth reverts to a pointed half-smile. “Ah. So, you didn’t graduate. You aren’t certified.”  
  
Whatever warmth had been coaxed out of me is abruptly stone cold. _You smug son of a bitch._ “I could have been,” I tell him.  
  
“Sure,” he says politely.  
  
“I’d done basically all my coursework. I started doing placements, and decided it wasn't for me.”  
  
He smiles in agreeable condescension. “So you got over your ...aversion to study?”  
  
I shrug and go back to eating. Unfortunately, I want to explain myself. “I met some kid in Juvie who wanted to be a doctor. A tad unrealistic. I don't think he could walk and chew gum at the same time,” I deride. “But he talked about cutting up bodies. I was just-- just realising-- anyway, I got my act together. Played penitent. Reformed individual, come to God, et cetera, et cetera. Hard work doesn’t bother me if it’s in the service of something I want.”  
  
The man opposite me is all aglow with triumph. The most alive I've seen Holden Ford. “You were in juvie?”  
  
_Are all of these questions checking the veracity of your psychological profile?_ “My god. The ‘serial killer’ had behavioural problems in his youth,” I say dryly. “Your predictions truly _are_ eerily prescient. Have you thought about publishing horoscopes in a women’s magazine? ...of course I was in fucking juvie.”  
  
Holden’s mouth opens, closes. Then-- surprising both me and, apparently, himself-- he laughs. I can see how the boyishness could be charming. “That’s a fair point. I didn’t ...specifically predict juvenile detention. Only early, and escalating, criminal acts. Are those records sealed, do you know?”  
  
“Yeah. Never got flagged going through med school. And it happened all the way back in Georgia, anyway, so--”  
  
“Georgia?” Holden says. His hands are resting on the table, one finger tapping. Looks as if he’s itching to take notes. “Interesting. Would I know of any of your crimes--”  
  
I laugh too, at that. “Your interests seem to be a little more grandiose than I was capable of at that age. Threatened to kill some kids at school, stole some things. Oh, I threw a glass coke bottle at the head of one teacher I hated. He had to have half a dozen stitches. The school kept all of that in-house. What actually prompted my arrest was unsuccessfully stabbing a classmate.” One of the rich, pretty-boy jocks who used to beat the shit out of the weirdo queer. I don’t tell Holden that. I don’t want to tell Holden that. It mars the purity of my violent urges, if I’m acting in retribution or, worse still, self-defense.  
  
“Unsuccessfully stabbed?” Holden asks, squinting. “You missed?”  
  
“Oh,” I say. Hadn’t even noticed my turn of phrase. “I got the knife in, alright. I was trying to kill him. Didn’t succeed. He yelled for help, some of his friends came, I ended up in hospital alongside him. ...alongside but not close enough to finish the job.”  
  
“That must have been very disappointing.”   
  
“At the time, yeah. Now, ..eh,” I mutter with a vague wave of my hand. “I’d like it if he were dead, of course, but with the benefit of retrospect I’d have to admit: a murder might have been harder to talk my way out of post-hoc.”  
  
“That’s entirely possible,” Holden says, with withheld amusement.  
  
I look down at the mostly finished food, and push the plate in. As I stand, I fish out a banknote from Holden’s confiscated wallet. He’s not going to be spending it, is he? I don’t order him around this time, but he trails after me closely all the same, right back to my car. He’s barely there as I drive, in some sort of Nick Napier obsessed reverie. Then I pull into a motel, and he’s back in the car with me.  
  
“Here?” he asks, sounding fussy.  
  
“What? No. Gotta sleep, Holden. When I kill you, you get to die. I have five or six hours activity after that, which I want to be entirely mentally present for.”  
  
Holden frowns, but seems to be exhausted beyond argument. Sobering up from the amount of alcohol he had in his system will do that. I hear him muttering “ _you get to die_ ” in a childish impersonation as he exits the car.   
  
I’m gonna need every fluid ounce of the minibar to keep from murdering him tonight.


	3. Chapter 3

_(h)_

  
  
I wake into fantasy. The motel room is dimmed out by heavy blinds but I can tell it’s bright enough to be well into the day. Inside is a carnival of blue shadow and startling highlights and the heady breath of men. There’s a minute thread of sunlight sneaking between drawn curtains, bisecting both beds head and tail. Golden. Alluring. I kick my tangled, sweat-drenched bedding aside, traipse after the ethereal brightness. I don’t think I’m still drunk, but I am intoxicated.  
  
I get as far as his bed. There, I stop. I mean to open my mouth. To say his name. To adhere the timeline of a murder that is yet to unfold. But all I am doing is staring, staring, staring.  
  
He’s atop all the made bedding, pillow barely supporting the corner of his skull. On his back, sprawled, too tall for the twin bed. On the bedside table is a half-empty bottle of white rum that Nick made me accompany him to buy; for all the world, an irresponsible, shirking babysitter as he complained to me about the selection of spirits in the 24 hour convenience store. Nick complains a lot, I’m noticing. Complained that there was no minibar in this seedy roadside motel room as if he were expecting the Hilton; complained about the cold interior (in late Autumn); complained when the room clogged with the scent of burnt dust, emanating from stuttery, struggling heater ramped up to the highest setting. I fell asleep to him drinking in front of a morning news report, mostly sober myself. 

When I’d sat with a file full of Nicholas Napier’s murders, pinpointing abduction sites on a street map, planning my bi-weekly circuit of bars linked to disappearances, I’d been imagining a more glamorous process of abduction and dismemberment.  
  
But it’s hard to be disappointed in Nick.  
  
His jacket is tossed haphazardly over the corner armchair, jeans on the floor nearby in a crumpled heap. Tossed, and fallen short, maybe. There’s also a coil of rope, which wasn’t there before I fell asleep. It doesn’t look very recently purchased. So, from his car boot. That’s odd. He has no reason to suspect I wouldn’t leave this motel room of my own volition.  
  
He left the heater on all night on the highest setting; probably passed out and simply forgot. I feel perspiration settled on every inch of skin, where my shirt and slacks cling and adhere. I wonder if it will bother Nick, if he’ll clean me up after death. There’s an inexplicable urge to shower and shave, cement my victimhood by being an appealing offering. But what choice does he have now, but to kill me?  
  
Nick is wearing just a fitted t-shirt, and white boxers with a raised diamond pattern. His legs are kicked casually apart; too long, impossibly defined with muscle, nestled all about with dark, straight hair. Even up to his thighs, where the golden thread of sunlight tickles across his exposed skin. I sit very cautiously on the edge of his bed, letting my weight dip in little by little. I can forget about his state of undress while I’m looking at only his face.

His skin tone is yellower than my own, slightly suntanned, but a natural pigment beneath that would prevent him from ever growing as pale as me. I can compare us readily, with my scuffed pink cuticle and whitened nervous knuckle held beside his chin. An inch short of contact. I don't touch him, but I think I want to. There are broken capillaries on the heights of his jutting cheekbones, tiny criss-crosses of deep maroon. Alcoholism, but I knew as much from his behaviour last night. The moustache is reassuringly unattractive; the same dark brown as his swept back hair, but unrelenting thick lines trimmed into sharp edges. There are undoubtedly tactile differences, though I haven’t gripped a handful of the tousled strands that brace against his sweat-sheened temple, and I haven’t run a finger across his peaked upper lip. He’s asleep. I could. ...he wouldn’t stay asleep.  
  
I couldn’t grow the same sort of expression of overt masculinity if I went a year without shaving, I’m certain. In that regard, I suppose I’m somewhat impressed, yet I find the style of grooming viscerally repulsive. I imagine kissing him-- rather, being kissed by him as I lie eternally passive-- and I’m pleased by my own negative reaction. I’m not a homosexual, I knew that. But I am going to let a homosexual murderer do what he wants with Holden Ford. That could be seen as a reflection of some subconscious preferences. I want to be murdered, that’s all. If I can look at his framed mouth, so masculine, so uninviting, I maintain the purity of my deathwish. 

His cheeks are unshaven, prickly just to look at. The dark stubble seeps out of the pores like oil, stiffens into stubby needles. He didn’t shave yesterday, and probably not the day before that. Then, there’s his size, equally off-putting. Nicholas Napier is a tall, broad man, musculature showing beneath his dull red tshirt. We stood face-to-face the night before. Perhaps not quite the goliath he’d seemed in the moonlight, but much taller than me. Five or six inches. Some nonsexual, intangible thrill lights up at the presence of a perfectly formed predator so defenceless before me. I lean ever closer.  
  
Even his scent is masculine, what I can smell beneath the liquor.

It reminds me of Bi-- reminds me of being on the road. Not like my own stale sweat manifesting in sodden sweatshirts after runs, and undershirts worn through stressful interviews; perhaps I’m used to my own body odour, perhaps I’m simply less of a man. I run a hand about the planes of my jaw, feel only a suggestion of the blonde stubble coming through.

I would have liked to find a woman to murder me, I think. But it would have been next to impossible. Female killers are a statistical aberration. Especially one as prolific as Nick.  
  
I must shift my weight while running knuckles over my upper lip, because Nicholas twitches. I stop dead, to see if he’s been roused from his slumber. No, the rumbling exhalation is too slow to be anything but sleep. His long lashes flutter, though, and the slight raise of cornea shows against the, again alcohol marred, eyelid. Flitting about maniacally. I wonder who he’s dreaming of.  
  
I sit with him a time. I match our breaths, sync up to this stranger. My future murderer. Perfect. Horrifying. Handsome. I didn’t expect him to be handsome; it shouldn’t make a difference, and yet I find myself morbidly flattered that this man is interested in me, or at least, my body. If he were just a queer, just cruising for something casual--  
  
Suddenly his eyes are wide open and he is staring up at me in panic. His muscles are locked up, shoulders tight. I open my mouth in reassurance. I never get a word out. He lunges upright, a rough hand grabbing my wrist, another at my throat. I tumble backward, too sheepish to fight, overbalancing right off the side of the bed. My skull hits heavy as wood upon the threadbare carpet. A dull and ugly crack of contact. Nick is on me like a wild animal, forcing me down by the throat. His eyes are wrathful, tight lines, teeth bared as if to consume flesh. The size differential becomes even more apparent as his knee goes to my stomach, as his huge hand ratchets tighter around my neck.  
  
“What were you doing, Holden.”  
  
If it’s a question, it doesn’t sound like one. I can’t speak anyway. I wheeze wordlessly at him.  
  
He releases my throat. He glowers down upon me. His hand raises, and I don’t flinch. The open fist comes down in painful cuff to my temple. The upper shell of my ear is clipped, suddenly red-hot with the impact, and my head slams back yet again into the carpeted floor. Now I pull away from him, try to twist and cradle into myself. He takes hold of my wrist again, bears that down to the floor beside my cheek. He’s as strong as he looks. Maybe stronger.  
  
“What were you doing? I asked you a goddamn--”  
  
“Looking,” I croak.  
  
“Looking?” he spits down at me-- actually spits, I feel a fleck of saliva hit my turned cheek.  
  
“I wanted to see you,” I whisper to the disgusting beige carpet. _The man who was going to murder me._  
  
“Don’t _ever_ get that close to me,” he hisses, then, “If you touch me, I’ll cut off whatever it was you touched me with.” His fingers are crushing my wrist so hard I think it might break inward.  
  
And just as abruptly, he lets me go. Stands up. Surveys me from his towering heights. I make no move to get even to all fours. I lie, crushed into the foulness of the motel floor, and blankly regard Nicholas Napier above me.  
  
Nick makes a sound of disgust, and steps away. I hear the rattle of his heavy leather belt as he pulls up his jeans. I stare at where he was above me and do not move. The motel’s door opens, slams.

 

 

It takes me a long time to get up, but I do. My eyes are bleary and leaking. I shower and wish I could shave, but there is no razor in the motel bathroom. I drink from the tap with two cupped hands. A burn-red bruise is forming on my wrist, perhaps on my neck too. The mirror has fogged over and I don’t want to clear it and see myself. I wander back out and sit on my own bed in my clingy-damp undershirt. Nick does not return. He has my wallet, so I cannot even leave and buy food to satisfy what gradually becomes a crippling hunger. Even the intellectual awareness of my impending doom does nothing to soften the stab of my stomach contorting through deprivation. I think I forgot to eat yesterday.  
  
Yesterday was all trepidation as I waited for the bar to open, for my planned surveillance to begin. Excitement, in spite of myself. Yesterday didn’t feel like the last day of my life.  
  
The door rattles, and I keep my eyes down as Nick speaks. “Tell your family you need a break. That you’re heading out of the state for awhile.” Something lands on the sagging motel bed by my hip.  
  
The items he’s handed me become an evidentiary puzzle. A ballpoint pen, too scuffed to be new, perhaps pilfered from the front desk. A fresh, laminated print postcard. It reads, ‘Virginia, the old dominion’’, in a multi-coloured block font. The letters dance joyously over a set of air-freshener green peaks that could, conceivably, be the Blue Ridge Mountains.  
  
“...my family?” I ask hollowly, as the words register.  
  
“Whoever is going to worry about you,” he says, impatiently. “You were FBI. I’m not having a manhunt. You will have a subdued, peaceful disappearance.”  
  
Maybe Shenadoah mountain. I nod to myself. “I’d prefer that, actually. If nobody found my body. I think the desecration of my corpse might bother--”  
  
“This isn’t about your preferences, Holden. Write the fucking thing. _Now._ ”  
  
I scoot around to the bedside table, hunched protectively over the flimsy cardboard. Routinely, I fill in Bill Tench’s name. A work address, of course. Bill wouldn’t want it going to his home. Then I am left with the squared off blank space allowed for communication. My pen hovers over this void of sentiment. I can’t even figure out the first sentence in my message of reassurance. It must serve as a farewell, too. That, no doubt, bothers me more than it will Bill. He’ll be so glad to have Holden Ford driven out of the Behavioural Science Unit.  
  
_‘I need to be somewhere else for a time. I like the changing leaves out here, it reminds me of the drive into Vacaville. How do golf courses deal with falling leaves? Or is it all evergreens. You know I don’t golf._  
  
_Holden Ford_ ’  
  
It seems benign enough. It occurs to me that I should open with a greeting-- but is ‘Dear Bill’ too familiar, after everything? Maybe just ‘Bill’? Before I can put pen to paper, the postcard is yanked away by Nick. He squints at the message, and I feel a stab of horror that I’ve handed over Bill’s full name. Bill isn’t his type, I reassure myself. And Bill has a gun. Bill is still FBI.  
  
“Fucking closet case,” says Nicholas Napier under his breath. He reaches to take the pen; I resist without realising.  
  
I look down. A clutched, trembling fist around the ballpoint. Nails scoring into my palm.  
  
“Are you planning to stab me with that?” he asks me scornfully. Another firm yank, and it’s away.  
  
“I’m not a closet case,” I hear myself saying. “I just broke up with my girlfriend.”  
  
“I think the closet comes with a free ugly girlfriend,” Nick laughs. “Kinda a twofer.”  
  
I stand to fetch my shoes, refusing to endorse his projections. I know what I am. I settle back down to lace them tight.  
  
Nick steps closer. I can see his boots and nothing else. His tone is casually bullying, but he seems more than curious about this. It seems to bother him. “...so, this girl, you really managed to get it up with her? ...who were you thinking of? Marlon Brando? ...James Dean?”  
  
I wonder what Wendy would surmise about the psychological underpinnings of this fixation with his victim's sex life. “I was thinking of my girlfriend,” I tell him in a neutral tone. I have both shoes laced, but I stay sitting on the edge of the bed staring down at them.  
  
“Were you thinking of my murders? Imagining being murdered at my hand?” Nick asks hypnotically. I finally look up, as he reaches into the pocket of the dark leather jacket. 

I think for a moment he’s going for a knife, and then I’m hit in the chest with something plush and forgiving. It rolls onto the threadbare bedding beside me: wrapped baked goods, probably from the same convenience store that the postcard came from, and that Nick’s rum came from the night before.  
  
“You’re going to die of hypoxia,” he informs me pleasantly. “Due to blood loss from a laceration or manual strangulation, I haven’t decided exactly. But certainly not from fainting and cracking your skull open on the sidewalk,” he says from behind dark aviators that look too expensive to be from a gas station. “So. Eat.”  
  
I take a loose hold of the packaging, fingers still trembling. It’s a plastic wrapped honey bun, squished and warm from being within the pocket of Nick’s leather jacket. I tear the plastic off, bite in.  
  
I see the lips curl beneath that thick moustache as he watches me eat. Not just distaste. It looks like genuine hatred. “Just as sweet as you, Holden,” Nicholas Napier says with awful sarcasm. He strides over to the snatch up his mostly finished bottle of rum, the abandoned rope. “We’re leaving.”  
  
Missed checkout, I’m sure. But I suppose Nick paid with my money. I stand up, scrunch the plastic into the small garbage can in the corner and pick up my seemingly irrevocably wrinkled dress shirt out of habit. Then I drop that in the garbage can too. I trail to Nick’s car, settle into the now familiar passenger seat.  
  
He walks away, to a blue postal box outside the gas station. I watch him studying my written message for too long. Thinking about vetoing my final communication. Nick glances in the direction of the car; I pretend not to be watching him. By the time I look back, bright postcard is disappearing through collection slot. I slump down in my seat and stay down.  
  
Despite the hangover I’m sure he’s nursing, he presses his cassette deck to action (a costly installation into the old, dirty Camarro) and at the climbing climax of raucous guitar solo. When I went for his registration the glovebox was crowded with dozens of cassettes, some store-bought and the others that look distinctly like bootlegs. 

I wonder if wilful subversion of copyright law could end up in a later iteration of the Macdonald triad.

 

  
  
Nick peels off into a drive-through several miles into our noisy, sombre roadtrip. No longer northbound, but peeling off west. Less suburb and more countryside. He orders without even glancing my way, and I stay quiet as he pays with money from my wallet. His victims always turn up naked, liberated of all their clothing and accoutrements. It’s unsurprising he’s used to casually spending money he didn’t earn. I wonder if he also steals. Petty crime would be an unsurprising manifestation of his psychopathy, but I have to think my Nicholas Napier is smart enough to avoid minor criminal acts as an adult. A warrant to search his apartment would be a guaranteed death sentence.  
  
I’m surprised when Nick tosses a burger onto my lap, though he’s already justified the expense of feeding me. I think about thanking him, just as he turns the music up pointedly. He begins to eat his own, driving one-handed. With his effortlessly elegant sweep of hair and his glinting dark sunglasses, he could be celebrity endorsement of a burger chain plastered across a billboard.  
  
I eat the burger and I’m not hungry anymore. I feel good, actually. Content.  
  
I know what Holden Ford’s future looks like. I’ve never really known that before.


	4. Chapter 4

“I first engaged in necrophilia when I was nineteen,” Nick says over more soaring guitars. A different cassette, which he made me find in his disorganised glovebox. An unlicensed taping with ‘Albatross (live) F.M.’ written in thick sharpie.  
  
It’s close to midday and I can still feel Nick’s hand around my throat. A phantom embrace of sore, ruptured blood vessels and swollen skin. My own fingers spread idly across my voice box.  
  
“It was the first time I’d orgasmed during intercourse with a partner,” he tells me, dry, dissected.  
  
Wendy would have something to say about that language. With a _“partner”?_ Assignation of personhood to a corpse. It might be an internal rationalisation of his necrophilic predilections. She’d say-- well, she’d say _‘Holden, what are you doing right now?_ ’ in a clipped tone that perfectly communicated the unfathomable misstep of my dalliance with Nicholas Napier. I stop thinking about Wendy Carr. “Had you murdered before then?” I ask, quickly.  
  
He shakes his head. Now, the movie star sunglasses come off. “I knew what I wanted, so I waited for it. I did it all right. Like I’m waiting for you, Holden. Waiting to do it right.” He’s trying to hide his eagerness to talk about himself. Strange. I think I was expecting Ke-- expecting a more open demeanour. It’s not shame that’s holding him back. The word necrophilia rolled silky and casual off his tongue. It’s-- it’s _egotism_ , I think. Nicholas needs me to be more interested in him than he is in telling _me_ about his crimes.  
  
“How did it feel? Your first time?” I encourage.  
  
That gets a smug chuckle. “You _are_ a virgin, aren’t you?” Nick says, looking over.  
  
I don’t quite contain a sigh. “In the ways that are relevant to your interests, I am,” I say, prim, restrained. I try not to imagine Nick’s interests too vividly.  
  
“Well, you’re currently alive. Quod erat demonstrandum,” he says coolly, turns the radio up.  
  
I blink fast at the flawless latin. “Do you like murdering people, Nick? Or is it simply a necessity in service of what you truly want?” I'm sure he likes it, but I allow him the space of denial.  
  
Nick actually thinks this through, smoothing his moustache with an index finger. “Well, that’s abstract. If you demarcate actions from outcomes enough, even enjoyable activities are 'a necessity' in service of what one truly wants. Pleasure, relaxation. ...shit, endorphins, if you want to be a philosophical realist about it. If there was another option to see what I want to see, feel what I want to feel, I suppose I'd take it. I want to have my pick of partners, I want to be in control of _when_ their lives ends, I want unfettered access to their bodies. If I could get that without murder-- I mean-- it's hard to actually entertain such an unrealistic proposition. If you're asking, couldn't I just get a job at a morgue? No. Of course not. Nothing else comes close to this, Holden. It is singular."  
  
He's fascinatingly clever when he's not drunk. I think I actually buy his 'more advanced than my peers' line. "Okay, then, less abstractly: do you enjoy the act of murder?"  
  
Now he nods. His fingers ripple against the steering wheel with stifled energy. "Yes. Watching people die violently is less ...exciting if I haven’t had a hand in the process. I mean, with my work, I see shootings and stabbings and... and in med school, I was around plenty of cadavers." His gaze grows unseeing with reminiscence. “Not as good, but good. So, I appreciate both the process, and the reward for my effort. I don't just murder for pleasure, and I don't think I'd ever bother to kill someone without the prospect of an appealing dead body. It would be too high a risk for too paltry a reward. ...I don’t enjoy disposal much. But if I don’t pose them, there’s less publicity. I like the publicity. I like the speculation. A little vanity never killed anyone,” he says with a dark smile. In my direction. As if we’re sharing an inside joke. Maybe we are.  
  
“...what do you like about dead bodies?”  
  
Nick shows more teeth. A grin, ostensibly. “You _really_ wanna know, Holden?”  
  
“I mean--” I begin in a strained, self-conscious tone. I cut myself short. Ridiculous. I was a professional; I inhabit that expired persona as I continue. “It it the temperature? The stillness? No risk of them touching you?”  
  
“What?” Nick asks roughly, expression hardening. “I’ve told you already: I’m not working through trauma.”  
  
“You don’t want to be touched,” I state clinically. “...you don’t like to be reminded that I’m alive.” This is more of an assertion, but I’ve noticed the reluctance to make contact with my skin, how he reacted when I had to eat. Even if I’m wrong, positing incorrect theory can prompt revealing correction.  
  
“I don’t like that you’re alive right now, Holden,” Nick says through clenched teeth. “I have ...fairly immediate plans to remedy that,” he adds darkly.  
  
I nod, mull over the potential psychological implications. So, a revulsion to physical indicators of life, as a normal man would experience to physical indicators of death. Misdirected neural pathways. _‘How would most men feel if they were being intimate with a woman and they sensed that she wasn't enjoying herself?’_ echoes a far-removed Wendy. “If they have no agency, there’s no chance of them reciprocating… or not reciprocating,” I muse. “There’s no vulnerability on your behalf. You are in perfect control of your partner’s sexual availability; their response, or lack thereof, to your societally-reviled proclivities.”  
  
The car swerves off the empty highway and onto the jolting roadside gravel. My hand shoots out for a grip on the passenger side door. Nick turns slowly to meet my gaze. An artist’s self-portrait: staring straight ahead, utterly unemotive. “You really don’t know when to keep your mouth shut, do you.” It’s not a question. It’s barely anything at all. Like someone muttering a frustration in the direction of an inanimate object.  
  
I keep my mouth shut.  
  
Nick’s fingers are shaking as they slide off the wheel. He leans over into the back seat, finding last night’s bottle of rum. Metal grates tunelessly against glass as Nick spins the top off. He rushes the liquid to his lips as if he’s stumbling out of some desert. The motion of his throat is fascinating. And then he pulls back out onto the road.

  


A few hours later, Nick pulls in for gas. The air has clouded up into vague blue-greys, and a cold, alpine wind descends unimpeded by leafless elms. He steps out eating an apple. Checks himself out in the reflection before he opens my car door. “Drive,” he tells me shortly, through a mouthful of white, crumbling flesh.

“Where?” I ask, stepping out, shrinking away from the leather clad arm resting on the car roof as I squeeze past.

He finishes his apple before he fishes out his keys. “West.”

I stop and look up from where I'm fiddling with the unfamiliar ignition. “Off the main road?” _Into fucking farmland?_

Nick gestures vaguely down the main road we’re on. He swigs from the rum again, a drip running over his bottom lip and down to a stubble-rough chin. The air is cut with acrid liquor. If a cop pulled us over, they’d be perfectly justified in testing me for a DUI, with that stink in the car. 

“That’s south,” I tell him flatly.

“It’s south-west.”

“It’s south- _south_.”

“Okay, Daniel fucking Boone, whip out your little dinky compass, and point this fucking expedition south,” Nick growls.

My response comes in a practiced, condescendingly adult tone: “...sure, Nick.” I start the car. I risk one glance over. Nick looks murderous. Then he’s throwing back more rum, eyes raised to the roof of the car like a holy man immersed in prayer.

 

 

“Pull over here,” he says, slurring his orders now. The sun is starting to dip. Late for a murder, I think. “The motel,” he adds, confirming my fears.

I put the blinkers on, crawl curb-side.

Nick gestures to a convenience store opposite. “Go buy me another bottle.”

I can only blink in disbelief. “You have my wallet.”

He glares for a moment, thick brows dipping together. His hips arch to reach into his back pocket, and he removes one of the last folded notes. I was carrying a fair amount of cash when Nick picked me up, a habitual remnant of spending so much time on the road. Nick has managed to blow through a lot of _my_ money over a couple of days.  
  
“White rum. Nothing too cheap,” he orders.

I am wordless with disdain as I cross away.

I buy: a bottle of the cheapest bourbon. On the way out I flit past a rack of postcards. My tripping fingers slide out a mass-produced, locationless sunset. I communicated myself poorly on first attempt. I should say a proper goodbye. But because I don’t want to think about Bill, I put the laminated cardboard back in place, and straighten the display.

 

 

The evening has grown brisk and the nameless town is barren. As I cross into sunset shadow, I uncork the bottle, press it to my lips. Three struggled gulps. I cough low in my chest at the blistering chemical burn, cheeks inflating like drum skin. But I don’t spill any. I try again; try to intoxicate myself into tandem with my murderer.  
  
A now familiar figure paces impatiently in the parking lot. A motel key, glinting in swung circles around his finger. He was beyond drunk, and yet he’s not swaying. Nick must see that I’m partaking because he approaches scowling and yanks the bourbon away. “I said buy _me_ another bottle.”  
  
I wipe my fiery, oak-coated lips. “That’s most of a bottle.”  
  
“What do you need to drink away? You’re getting what you want.”  
  
“What do _you_ need to drink away? You’re getting what you want,” I return petulantly, folding my arms across myself. I feel naked down to my undershirt.  
  
I think, maybe, he’s going to hit me. But he’s amused, and seems surprised to find himself amused by Holden Ford. He doesn’t tell me to follow when he turns, but I understand Nick now. And I think I’d follow him anywhere.  
  
That doesn’t mean I’m enjoying spending time with him.  
  
“Twin, I hope,” I say under my breath as he’s turning the key.  
  
He flicks on the light, gestures grandly within. Two beds. A lot nicer than last night’s accommodation.  
  
“I wouldn’t share a bed with you. If I got one bed, you would be sleeping on the fucking floor, Ford,” Nick says dismissively. He walks to a countertop and sets down the bottle.  
  
The neither of us having a bag, I can’t tell which bed he wants, and I don’t want to give him any ideas by selecting at random. So I loiter behind him, watch as he covertly removes something from a pocket. He shifts it between hands. Like a preparing magician, though there’s something far more sinister about this surreptitious act. Then, as if remembering himself, he turns with an open palm. Pills sitting in a creased ziplock bag. I don’t recognize the bulky, pharmacy-pressed, white shapes, but can only assume them to be flunitrazepam. That’s what he’s always used.  
  
Nick removes one from the ziplock bag, hesitates. Then a second pill, caught in a curl of fingers. He extends his hand for me to take. Drops them into my palm without touching me.  
  
Two stark white pills rest in the palm of my hand harmlessly uningested. “I can’t dry swallow these,” I tell him, rolling one with my thumb.  
  
Nick nods. He’s otherwise non-communicative. He stows the remaining pills (for a second, I catch myself doing arithmetic on potential future murders) and then uncorks the bottle of liquor. I take that too.  
  
I put one between my teeth, crook my chin up, let the flunitrazepam come to rest chalky and alkaline onto my tongue. I raise the bottle, wetting around the thing, getting it down. The second pill I spare no contemplation for, just press it between clenched teeth and swig it amidst a throatful of bourbon. I imagine I feel it descending down the run of my esophagus, and into that busy acidity, into those membranous chambers. And then onwards, inwards, to my bloodstream. How long, for flunitrazepam to render me meek and defenceless? A quarter of an hour? Perhaps-- perhaps twenty minutes? I could still run. Outrun Nick? Those long legs-- the strength to him, when he’d catch me-- even if I screamed, he could smother that. This roadside motel isn’t exactly white picket fences and concerned neighbours. Would anyone even call the police, if I was shouting for help? The front desk clerk? Another guest in an adjacent room? The place seemed all but empty. I realise I’m not even contemplating fighting Nick off. I’ve been trained, of course. But he has a knife. And he’s had training of his own, in a way. Ten victims that I know of, certainly more that I don’t. A repetition of learning experiences.  
  
Of course, I don’t do anything melodramatic. When I wipe the tingling-dry liquid from my mouth, my hand is steady.  
  
Nick is still regarding me closely even after full cooperation in dosing myself. I open my mouth, raise my tongue, like an inmate proving pills have been swallowed. _My willingness is still in question? Really?_  
  
Nick confiscates the bottle back without ever deigning to touch my lingering fingers. He sits down on the bed, swigs, but closes it and sets it beyond reach. I’m surprised that Nick is planning to commit a murder so intoxicated. Perhaps he knows he’ll have sobered up by the time body disposal becomes necessary.  
  
“Least I’m not gonna wake up to you watching me,” Nick adds in his drunken drawl. I can hear Georgia, now I’m listening for it. He walks towards the television set, flicking it on, lounging onto the bed and stripping his way out of the leather jacket. He props himself up on the bed with one overworked arm. He drinks more, drops the recapped bottle onto the bed and paces back to the TV to toggle the volume. I finally focus on what he’s watching. A black and white film, with a morose jazz number. A trumpeter serenades a skinny woman with slick dark hair. “Creep,” he adds, over an unfurling peak of syncopated melody. I realise he’s insulting me.  
  
I look away. Examine the window, the unshuttered blinds. I feel a flush begin to creep up my throat, prickly and smothering, like an allergy. I don’t think that’s the roofies. “I’m the creep? You stalk and kill people,” I tell him, no energy to inject attitude. I hoist my spent form upright, and I pull the blinds down. A murder scene should have some modicum of privacy.  
  
“Stalk? Oh, no. Usually I just wait for them to waltz into my arms,” Nick says, suddenly right beside me by the shuttered window. His hand is on my hip, turning me. He’s very, very drunk. I can smell it radiating off him like thick cologne. I see a tremble in his fingers but then he takes my hand anyway. He drags it up to head height, and there’s an awkward tug as some school dance instincts slip in, and we both try to cup beneath the other's hand.  
  
I see his face twitch with exertion. Repressed violence, I think. 

He forces my wrist up, turns my hand over. “On my shoulder,” he tells me testily.  
  
My other hand slips, avoidant of skin contact, up to Nick’s shoulder. But there, mimicking partnership, contact seems unavoidable. I can’t tell what he wants from me, which sets me ill at ease. That’s why my heart is trying to kick its way out of my chest cavity. I rest just fingertips on him. Barest contact with this thing I have thought so long about. A bunched muscle beneath his tshirt, the buzzing body heat. Trembles of that unknowable, predatorial energy. A man.  
  
Nick leans his way into that sacrosanct separation of bodies. “Are you scared of me, Holden?” he asks me intimately.  
  
“...I came to you,” I tell him without looking up. I’m staring straight ahead, which means I’m closely regarding the faint curl of derision of his upper lip. And that facial hair. I wish I felt repulsed; instead, I feel compelled towards this rugged vision. I look down at where my hand rests on him instead, my fingers nervously cramped together like the unarticulated plastic mitt of a mannequin. I suddenly remember Kemper’s hug. I froze up then, too. ...this is different. I chose this, like I told him.  
  
Nick’s hand traces around my shoulder like a butcher rehearsing a cut. Speculative, even though contact remains firm. Then lower, to the small of my back, still prodding away like I’m already meat. He presses me forward, and I barely stutter into footsteps to avoid falling against him. He whispers over the music. Sounding personally aggrieved, he tells me: “I can’t wait until you’re dead.”  
  
I should agree with him, but my head is spinning. I do want to be dead. Don’t I? His hand in mine, softer than I thought it could be. He’s steering me through a box step. What I want doesn’t matter. I’m going to die.

I’m lagging, but Nick seems to instinctively stick to the melancholic beat. My eyes are closed-- more than closed, screwed tight as if I’m fighting off tears (I’m not) -- and I hope his are closed too. It feels too personal to be observed.  
  
I hear him humming something low and pretty. Not the song that’s playing from the television set. I stumble and he corrects me with the hand on my hip.  
  
A woman’s voice breaks us apart. The film dialogue resuming.  
  
I cough up a lungful of anxiety-trapped air as Nick pulls away.  
  
His eyes are wide open. He looks kind-- well, not _kind_ \-- soft. He looks utterly incapable of the things I know he’s done. Then the screen switches to the hubbub of a restaurant and even though it’s only bright pixelation, it’s too close to an audience for Nick.  
  
He sits down abruptly, leaving me standing in the center of the plushly carpeted room. He flicks through channels fast and impatient, coming to rest finally upon a sitcom: an African American family I don’t recognize, a plush home setting, a grating laugh track. I don’t watch much television.  
  
Nick looks up expectantly at me after several seconds of excruciatingly good-humoured programming. “Lie down, Holden,” he all but orders.  
  
I do. I recline atop the still-made single bed. I thought my murder would feel more momentous. More intimate. Was that wishful thinking? The young man on television cracks a joke that sounds like a pop culture reference. Nick laughs. I don’t get it. I’m going to die. _I’m going to die._ I should say something-- and then I realize there’s no sympathy to be had in this room. I stay listening to a television show I do not understand, and then it must finish, because there’s a news report. A nasal voice is predicting a secondary eruption in Mount St. Helens. A tragic shootout has occurred outside a family restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland.  
  
I’m going to die.  
  
I decide to get up, leave, call ... _who?_ Bill? ...I don’t want to be rescued from Nick Napier. I can’t even get up and leave, if I did endorse this last minute indecision with action. My limbs are no longer cooperating. They are weighty and lazy and beyond me.  
  
“Holden?” Nick says. He doesn’t sound excited or aroused. He sounds young and tentative.  
  
I try to answer, and cannot. I’ve severed whatever tie allowed me to manoeuvre this meat. I can’t even open my eyes.  
  
“Holden?” This time his low tone is nearer, and further away. I think I hear a rumble of excitement.  
  
And then he touches me, to shake my shoulder. And whatever horrified, existential loneliness I’d been feeling is replaced with fuzzy pleasure. Not sexual, I don’t think. This is a union of two perfectly meshed desires. I want to be murdered; he wants to murder me. What greater satisfaction could there be? _Perfect._ His fingers are at my shirt collar. The sound of something scraping over my chest. A cold and sharp nudge. A knife. ...but he’s only cutting away my overworn, rancid undershirt. I barely register it as my own clothing. Fabric tears somewhere on another plane of existence; the last sensation that I have the slightest peripheral awareness of.

 

  
  
And then the cold wakes me.


	5. Chapter 5

_(n)_

 

 

I think about Holden all morning as I traipse across the shitty little town on errands for him. About the usual: how he'll look dead, how beautiful his enduring stillness will be, how luxurious his fading mortality will be to immerse myself in. There's some wholly unexpected thoughts, too. How well he'll be suited by the shirts I'm thumbing through, in the depressing menswear section of the only clothing store I could find. How solid and bearable he felt swaying in my arms through our waltz. His petty, retributory sense of humour. ...last night. I think about last night a lot. _Told you I could, if I wanted to, Holden._  
  
And then I get back to our room, and he’s not in it.  
  
“Holden?” I say tentatively into what should be a shared space. There’s no reply from the man I was just getting accustomed to cohabitation with. Only the crumpled bedding, his cut away clothing, my empty bottle of bourbon on the dresser, and the smell of stale, sweated-out booze cut by the cold seeping in the still open window beside his bed.  
  
I don’t even set down the shopping bags; I cross the room in several paces, air suddenly thin with absence. Over my own pulse I hear something, crackling, moving. ...the shower, it takes me too long to put together. The bathroom door is closed but there’s no lock. I’ve pulled enough overdosed corpses and staggering drunks out of motel rooms on the job to appreciate the wisdom in installing a door that doesn’t need to get broken down on the regular.  
  
“Holden?” I call through, hitting the door with a closed fist. Then impatience gets the better of me. I pull the door in.  
  
Then I can breathe again.  
  
He’s hunched over small in the corner of the shower. I can barely see him through a wall of steam roiling internally against the mineral-flecked glass, but he's there.  
  
“What are you--” I huff with annoyance. I drop the bags and open the shower door, reaching through what is a scalding flow to turn the water off. “What are you doing? You have to be careful after a high dosage like that. You could fall over and--”  
  
He seems to register my presence finally, lurches away from me in graceless terror. Can’t get his balance on the intersecting white and green tiling as he scoots even further into a corner. Flunitrazepam will do that to you the morning after, if you survive that long. It’s not the inelegance that amazes me, it’s the animalistic fear in Holden’s eyes. He could be any one of my boys the first time they register their incoming doom.  
  
I lean back, shaking water off my sleeve. Every movement accompanied by a reflexive adrenal-twitch from the man below me. Holden is in a room with a monster, and he’s finally realised it.  
  
“You’ll fall and hurt yourself,” I say in a contained, gravelly tone. I don’t quite meet his eyes. “You should have stayed in your bed.”  
  
“Why am I alive?” Holden asks in a voice contorted with horror. There’s no philosophical depth to the question. A purely situational query.  
  
That throws me. “Did you think I was going to do it last night? ...in a motel room?”  
  
Holden splutters as he tries to reply: “...I--I thought you’d ...figure out a way to do it bloodlessly, or transport me to a secondary location…”  
  
I interrupt the naive spiel. “You said you wanted to be unconscious. I gave you the pills you specifically asked me to bring. I’m failing to see what you’re so ...upset about.”  
  
“Unconscious then _dead_. No-- no interim of-- of--” he can’t seem to get it out.  
  
“Of what, Holden? Of being ...defiled?” I ask, squatting down to almost his level. Now that I regard him closely I can see a mark of my own teeth on his collar. I’m not used to bodies that mark up. ...I don’t mind this change.  
  
He draws back from me in tandem. He looks pathetic with fear. I'd thought better of my Holden.  
  
“No interim during which you are unable to rationalise your way out of your homosexuality?” I prod, tersely. There’s a painful bloom of disappointment in my chest. Like I’m the one who is about to die.  
  
Finally, he meets my eye. Unsteady, with the benzo hangover, but bolstered with retaliation. “ _I’m_ the one with delusions about my sexuality? You know, you’re not homosexual if you’re repulsed by men. As in, living men, men that supposed homosexuals would be attracted to,” Holden hisses with a hateful curl of his lip. “You’re just sexually non-functional.”  
  
I laugh softly and lean in close. Now I relish how he flinches. _You wouldn’t say that. If you’d seen me last night._ “You want me to kill you right now? In this motel bathroom?” I ask with false gentleness. “Pain in the ass to clean up, but you might earn it you keep talking like that.”  
  
“Yes. I do want you to kill me now,” he fires back, for all the apparent fear.  
  
_“Why?”_ I finally ask of him, exasperated. “Why do you want to die?”  
  
Holden sneers at the unwelcome question, but then his confrontational posture slackens. Shame debilitates him. “I told you. I lost my job,” he mutters towards the warm, swimming tiles.  
  
“It’s a job,” I say incredulously. “I’m sure the pay at the FBI is good, but--”  
  
He shakes his head. Seems to be having trouble breathing steadily, but he’s determined to explain himself. “I wasn’t just another suit. I was foundational to what I consider to be a major procedural development within the Bureau. I was pursuing pure obsession, and I was free to do so. ...fairly free to do so. And I-- I was good at it. Better than good. I was the best. What should I do now? Resign myself to new, perpetual mediocrity? Take up a menial job and subsist? Watch someone else get credit for-- for what I--”  His head goes into his hands in hopeless, heavy resignation. A straining Atlas wishing to finally set down his burden. “There were people I wanted to earn the respect of, and instead I lost my standing entirely. I’ll never get that back either,” he says quieter. His face is still hidden amongst his own open palms. “I know what I could have been, Nick. I know the man I could have been. A pioneer. An undisputed expert. Worthwhile, by anyone’s measure. That man will stay with me until I die. And he will never remove his foot from my neck.” His normally considered tone has edged brittle and grating. Every exhaled syllable seems to come at the cost of his oxygen supply. He gapes hollowly on the bathroom’s steam.  
  
I lean down, gently fix the way his wet hair is smeared over to his clammy forehead. His skin is a lot warmer now than it was last night when I’d opened up every window in the motel room, but it’s easier to touch now that we’re habituated. “I’m going to kill you. You need to calm down,” I tell him evenly.  
  
The helter-skelter breathing takes some time to settle. Dark blue eyes appear between a guarding mask of threaded fingers. They blink with renewed acuity. “...when?” Holden asks.  
  
“Today. A few loose ends to tie up,” I promise him, for some stupid reason. “So shower, get dressed, or we’ll miss check out. ...I got you a razor. You should shave, change into some fresh clothes. There’s an outfit in the bag.” _Which I bought with my own money._ I don’t think telling Holden that will score me any points right now. _...points?_ With Holden? A man I’m about to murder? This is an exercise in absurdity.  
  
And then he leans fractionally into my hand, still at his hairline. The gifts don’t seem absurd for one fleeting moment. “Thank you,” he murmurs.

“You’re, uh, welcome,” I say in a stilted tone. This is a level of politeness not even my own parents could drill into me. I draw my hand back sharply, and stand away from him to meet my own spooked expression in the mirror. My knife is in my pocket (always in my pocket), I could fix this mistake before--  
  
“Why haven’t you killed me yet, Nick?” Holden asks, the gauze of loose fingers all lowered from his eyes. He’s not outraged or betrayed now. His head has lolled backwards casually, posture opening up into defencelessness. But I know my Holden. And I know that he’s back to studying me ruthlessly.  
  
There’s something unthinkably beautiful about the juxtaposition of his lax posture and his ravenous intellectual hunger. For a great deal of my childhood I kept a close up of the sprawled dead prophet in the Pietá pasted on the ceiling above me. My parents were, for the first time, optimistic about the salvation of my eternal soul. Nevermind that I tore the page out of a borrowed library book. I was embracing the iconography; moral codification would follow. Holden has something inherently classical about him, as if these features were inducement for a million aspirational marble statues. I realise I’m not replying to his question. “You ever heard the joke about the three-legged lamb?” I ask.  
  
“... _what?_ ” he asks as if I’m crazy.  
  
That takes care of that sentimentality. “Hurry up with your shower,” I mutter, and close the flimsy dividing door as hard as I can without incurring repair costs.

 

 

We don’t speak again until we’re in my car and driving south again. Holden is wearing the t-shirt and jeans I bought him, in exactly the style I like: fitted, youthful, boyish. It looks terrible on him compared to his suit. I make sure I avoid watching him eat his breakfast, so he can’t try to read microexpressions and psychoanalyse me into any of his stupid categories. I look over as he starts trying to find a plastic bag to tuck the garbage into amongst the odd items carpeting my car.  
  
“Just throw it out the window,” I offer, my right hand sweeping the expanse of overcast, unobserved wilderness we’ve stolen away into.  
  
“I’m not going to litter,” he retorts as if I’d asked him to hurl a newborn from the car window, instead of an instant oatmeal container.  
  
“Worried about the moral implications?” I ask with affected concern.  
  
There’s a tiny grimace. Then he laughs to himself, but not at my joke.  
  
“What?” I prompt.  
  
“...I’m trying to decide whether these are possible behavioural indicators of predisposition to psychosexual violence.”  
  
“Which ‘behavioural indicators’?”  
  
“Littering. Making bootleg cassettes.” I think maybe he’s trying to provoke me, but I’m endeared by the attention to detail.  
  
“First they came for the bootleggers,” I intone solemnly. “And I did not speak out--”  
  
He says something under his breath that sounds like ‘for fuck’s sake’, and goes back to his search beneath the car seat.  
  
I grin. I feel airy and affectionate towards this poor, repressed wretch of a man contorting himself into legal rigour. “C’mon. Throw it out the window,” I encourage.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Live a little, while you still can. Break some rules.”  
  
“I’m not going to throw it out the window,” he says snippily. He sits up, arms folded. “I don’t derive any pleasure from making my garbage someone else’s problem.”  
  
“It’s not about the _garbage_ . It’s about the willful subversion of societal standards. It’s about the rebellion. About doing something that you haven’t allowed yourself to--” I begin, and stop deadly silent.  
  
Holden’s hand is on me. 

On my shoulder to be exact. 

He’s staring up hopefully, and then he leans forward and--  
  
I slam the brakes. My arm goes under his chin, forcing it safely away from me. I pin him back into the passenger’s side.  
  
“What the fuck,” I growl.  
  
“...I thought-- I thought you were talking about-- I’m-- sorry--” Holden coughs.  
  
My wrist is still under his throat. I’m not sure if I can feel Holden’s heartbeat or my own. “Don’t. Okay? Don’t,” I say, trying to keep panic out of my tone. “I told you not to do that.”  
  
He nods as much as the chokehold allows.  
  
I drop him, retreat quickly back to my seat. I accelerate hard as if I’m going to outstrip that skin-crawling experience.

 

 

After ten minutes of frigid silence, he says “sorry” again under his breath. I look over. Holden is entirely shrunken and still, too long dead for me to have any interest in.  
  
It's in this moment of penance that I opt to advance my agenda: “You need to call whatshisname. The guy you send that postcard to.” _Bill Tench._ I’m not going to say his full name and have Holden thinking I’m all wound up about this other man in his life. “You were too vague. Too mopey. Can’t have him thinking you’re about to step off a bridge or take a nap on a set of train tracks; welfare checks will be a pain in my ass. Last thing I need is some FBI agent on our trail. You have to call him--”  
  
_“What?”_  
  
“--and tell him you’re going to travel for a while and getting your head together.”  
  
_“Travel?”_ Holden echoes disbelievingly.  
  
“Fine. Construct your own more compelling lie, Holden,” I huff. “Buy yourself a month or two in which nobody is gonna be poking around your disappearance. After that, the chance of eyewitnesses remembering seeing us together is negligible.”  
  
“This is an unnecessary precaution. Bill will not be a problem for you,” Holden says, folding his arms.  
  
_I’ve known you for only a few days and I’m already unpleasantly attached. So I’ll play it safe with this stranger who has so much personal significance to you._ I don’t say any of that, of course. “I'll decide what precautions I will and won’t to take, Holden. You’re going to do as I say. Or I’ll drop you beside the road right now,” I threaten. ...I hope I threaten.  
  
Holden has drawn himself up, set his shoulders to a squared off stance that I assume was supposed to make him look authoritative, back when he was FBI. New equally geometric angles appear in his tightly clenched jaw. “Oh? And what if I call you in, Nicholas Napier?”  
  
I slow the car to a crawl, pointedly examining the forested hillsides surrounding us. “Couple of hours walk to the nearest town, I’d say. Maybe you’d get lucky, manage to hitchhike. Maybe you’d get unlucky and end up murdered by some fag-hating hick. But, even assuming that the ‘disgraced profiler Holden Ford’ has any sway with law enforcement whatsoever, you’d have to tell them you were in my apartment if you wanted to get a search warrant. And how long would a warrant take to procure, based on your flimsy and assumedly unreliable testimony? I wouldn’t drive the long way round this time. A couple of hours, and I’d be home. There’s not a whole lot of evidence to hide. I run a tidy operation, like you said. And even if someone came knocking on my door, I’d tell them you were a jilted ex-lover.” _And that would be true,_ I almost, spitefully, add.  
  
Holden’s chin raises minisculely. He counters me clipped and sharp: “Actually, I would tell them I thought you had someone kidnapped and held in your apartment. Bypass the need for a warrant. I know the exact checklist of legal requirements to justify them kicking your door down and tearing the place apart inch-by-inch. I could even call that in anonymously, so the connotations of my name won’t come into the equation at all.” My fingers creep into my jacket pocket. The knife feels feather-light and urgent. My foot has slipped over to the brake, anticipating the chaos to come. Holden continues, unafraid. “Besides, you kill your victims in that apartment. No matter how well you think you clean up after yourself, forensics will turn something up. Blood gets everywhere, Nick. We find it soaked into the wallpaper, sunk through carpeting, clinging to pipes and drains--”  
  
I shut him up by force. It takes me a moment to realise I’m kissing him, not thrusting a knife into his chest.  
  
At first he’s clearly panicking. A sharp inhale like genuine terrified airlessness. He’s a rigid as someone hours old. Gradually he welcomes me. Opens his mouth in an exploratory manner. It’s godawful.  
  
“Don’t,” I warn him roughly against his open lips.  
  
He stops. I hear him holding his breath. Pliant. Non-reciprocal. My perfect boy. I kiss him, again, open-mouthed. Not as good as he was last night. Warmer. Tension where there was delightful slackness. But it’s still shockingly pleasant. I’m not even touching my knife, and I’m relaxed.  
  
I pull back, panting slightly. Holden presses himself against the seat as if anticipating a car crash. His fingers are splayed wide apart and white over the dark scuffed leather upholstery, his jaw slack, gasping at now undenied air.  
  
“I--”  
  
“I’ll call him,” he reassures me, right as I start to speak.  
  
I’m glad to be interrupted. I’m not precisely sure what I was going to blurt out. “There’s a cassette labelled ‘Baby’s on Fire’. If you wouldn’t mind putting that on.” _Again. Politeness. ...fuck._  
  
Holden rummages through and emerges successful. He’s extremely clumsy swapping out the tapes, but then the silence is mercifully dispersed. The wailing guitar riff reminds me of someone screaming desperately for help. But even that can’t calm me down right now.  
  
Mist has slithered down meandering valleys and coated the highway thick and viscous. Our car carves through the vague shapes fog, coalesces splatters of rain around straining yellow headlights. Holden’s forward stare is shock-empty.  
  
I drive slowly now. Thread through shivering, half-damp hillsides. Pass a few scattered homes and another gas station. A faded blue sign weakly encourages us towards “Hallegraeff Alpine Lodge”. More houses.  
  
“Phone...booth,” we begin to say in unison. Holden drops the second word.  
  
“...you have an idea of what you’re going to say?” I ask, wishing I had something to drink.  
  
Holden nods with all the appearance of decisiveness. He seems to have beaten the morning after drugged-out fogginess. “It means a lot that you trust me with this, Nick.”  
  
I have no idea what that means. I exit the car with him, pacing over to the phonebooth. It’s mid-morning, but the blue-grey smothering from above comparatively brightens the overhead red ‘PHONE’ sign.  
  
Holden stares perplexed as I shuffle in beside him to perspex box. Barely. A chilling corner run-off dribbles down my hunched shoulders. It’s wholeheartedly raining now.  
  
“Well, I want to hear what he says,” I justify.  
  
“O...kay.” He self-consciously glances about the fog-obscured street. Doesn’t reach for the phone.  
  
“You do this right, and… you get a free pass on an insulting question,” I offer in a low voice.  
  
Holden throws me a slight smile, all in soft focus against the electronic console. He nods a few times, clearly steeling himself, and then raises a deliberate hand to slot the handful of coins in. His saliva-wet lips twitch through an inaudible rehearsal as he dials out.  
  
He knows Bill’s number off the top of his head, I can’t help but notice. There’s more going on between them than Holden is purporting. There has to be.  
  
I lean closer, put my arm tight around Holden as I crane my neck down towards the receiver. I can hear the phone on the other end ringing, and then stop ringing. There’s a beat of inexplicable silence. I figured this was a work number, this time of day.  
  
“Bill?” Holden says, tentatively.  
  
There’s only crackling silence in our crowded phone booth. It stretches until I think Holden and I are alone. Then there’s a harsh interruption. A man’s voice, rough with emotion: “I should wring your fucking neck, Holden.”

I find myself in confusing agreement with Bill.


	6. Chapter 6

Holden doesn’t reply. At all. At first it’s an awkward pause and then it seems like he might just be waiting to this _Bill_ to hang up. I cuff him on the back of the head, and when he glances up, I mouth ‘go on’. He doesn’t oblige.  
  
Bill Tench isn’t hanging up. The tirade begins, so strident and enunciated that I don’t miss a word: “Maybe start with where the fuck you’ve been. Why you aren’t answering your fucking phone, or the messages I’ve left you, or the messages I had to ask _Wendy_ to leave you. Maybe start there, Holden. That would be a good place to start, in your explanation.” _Wendy? Is that his ex-girlfriend?_ I hate this implication of other people caring about Holden Ford enough to check up on him. Holden has been exclusively mine the entire time I’ve known him.  
  
I lean closer, partially to hear better, partially to maximise physical contact with Holden. Remind him of the purpose of this phone-call: to seal his fate as one of my victims. When he speaks, I feel the horrible brush of warm breath on my neck and have to fight my own kneejerk revulsion in order to stay huddled beside him.  
  
“Everything you needed to say, you said to the OPR. I can’t imagine what further discussions you would want to have,” Holden says into the mouthpiece. He’s stiff, hurt, overly formal. “I got the message about being on probationary leave, after your testimonial to my shortcomings as an agent. I wasn’t interested--”  
  
He’s cut off by Bill. “Your probationary leave finished Monday, you stupid, petty bastard. How did you think I was going to cover for you when--”  
  
_“What?”_  
  
“It was over Monday. We were supposed to fly out to Westchester to interview--”  
  
“They said indefinite leave,” Holden protests.  
  
“Not indefinite,” Bill huffs. “Until they’d adjudicated the matter of the missing tape. And then they revised it to-- fuck, Holden, when did you last check your answering machine?”  
  
“I thought I was fired. ...I didn’t want to hear that on a message,” Holden says emptily. The vocal equivalent of a thousand-yard stare.  
  
Bill doesn’t even seem to hear the response. He’s still hurtling down his own train of thought. “Shit. You mean you haven’t even picked up your gun and badge? You have any idea the sort of questions that raises, as to your reliability? How can you possibly expect the OPR to come to any sort of favourable conclusion if you drop off the face of the fucking planet at the first hitch you hit?”  
  
“ _Hitch?_ Bill, they’re going to _fire me_ .”  
  
“There’s-- Sheppard is retiring, Holden. Things are shifting around. I mean, shit, they might fire you. Not beyond belief. You would absolutely fucking deserve it at this point.”  
  
Holden winces worse than any pain I’ve seen him in. Inflicted upon him. He opens his mouth. Closes it fruitlessly.  
  
“...I expect you to be at your desk in an hour. Get yourself looking real fucking presentable. Practise your humbled expression in the mirror, hm?” Bill says brittly.  
  
“I can’t-- I can’t make it in. Not in an hour.”  
  
“And why the fuck not?”  
  
“I’m-- a friend needed help with something. Interstate. I’m ...three or four hours… I think--” he cuts himself off. I can feel him pull ever so slightly away from me.  
  
“Well, get in your car and start fucking driving,” Bill says with pleasant, hateful irony. The phone clicks. Holden sets the receiver back in its cradle so gently he could be handling a live explosive.  
  
“What an asshole,” I mutter, sidling out of the phonebooth.  
  
“No he’s not,” I hear Holden say behind me. Then Holden has sunk forward. His forehead presses into the phone receiver. His face twitches, warps through expressions so fast I can’t pick them. “Oh god,” he breathes out, a shuddery, hissing crescendo.  
  
“But he’s the one who got you fired--” I start to say.  
  
“He didn’t lie to cover up my fuck up. But I wouldn’t have expected him to. ...or wanted him to. Bill’s not that sort of person,” Holden is telling the metallic keypad. He straightens up. “I-- this doesn’t change-- our plans--” he says, without sounding even a little like he believes it.  
  
I raise an eyebrow deliberately. I’ve backed up enough that rain and run-off is dribbling down through my hair now. “No? The FBI agent expecting to see you in a few hours doesn’t change our plans?” I want to stab him so badly it feels like my own life depends upon it. Like it’s self-defense. I’m breathing like I’ve been sprinting, instead of listening in on a boring work phone call.  
  
“They’re going to fire me,” he insists.  
  
“ _Bill_ didn’t seem so sure of that,” I say, emphasizing the name a lot more than I intended.  
  
“...Nick, I can’t go back. I can’t--”  
  
“You come across clever, sometimes, Holden. And then you go and spout stupid bullshit like this,” I snap. I stalk back to the car, throwing the door open, jerk the key into the ignition and grab the wheel so hard I’m surprised the pieces of metal don’t come apart in my hands. I think about other men I’ve killed, transpose Holden’s face over my imperfect previous victims. On plastic sheeting, bound and bared and mine for the taking. But not unconscious like they always are. The Holden of my violent ruminations is begging forgiveness for misleading me. Begging for me, for my knife, for the perfect conclusion to his hopeless existence. But it’s back to being just fantasy. Because now, Holden has hope. I hate him for it. I hate Bill for it. ...I really hate Bill.

 

  
  
As the rain thickens and my rage eases, I realise I didn’t hear Holden following me, or entering the car. At long last, I look back towards the phonebooth.  
  
Holden is stuck, one foot inside the shining bright , one foot out in the feebly falling rain. There’s a forlorn look on his upturned face, closed lashes fluttering to dispel the water washing down him. Is he crying? I can’t tell. His hands are open by his side. He looks as if he’s awaiting a rapture he wouldn’t deserve.  
  
I slide across the car, crank down the window. “Holden. Get in the car.” I meant to sound strict, instead I’ve slipped towards entreating.  
  
Holden’s eyes open. He’s not crying. He shakes his head, mouths something-- ‘I can’t’, I think.  
  
I grunt with frustration and push the car door open. I walk up to him, catch him around the shoulders with one arm. He’s not resisting as I drag him back towards the car, but he’s barely cooperative. His feet slip through the roadside puddles. I open the door, push the back of his head down like I’m law enforcement and he’s a criminal.  
  
I’m some inexplicable combination of livid and concerned as cross around to the driver’s seat. I swing the already running car through a u-turn, sending a membranous muddy wall towards the offending phone booth. “You wanted to die because you lost your job. Now you know that you haven’t lost your job. So what do you want in light of this development, Holden Ford?” I have no idea why the words relax me. Why I feel relieved. _I want Holden to want to die._  
  
“You said you’d do it today,” he says, entitled and insistent. “I want what we agreed to.”  
  
I finally summon up the courage to turn my head some slight fraction. I expose myself to this newly forbidden fruit exclusively through sidelong glances. I don’t want to be reminded of what I’ve lost. “Don’t be stupid.”  
  
He wavers with the insult. His eyes drop to look at his rigidly entwined hands. I wait expectantly. There’s a void between us, that Holden should be filling with clever schemes to make his own murder possible. Or apologizing for endangering me with his own carelessness. Maybe he should say, ‘it’s okay, the FBI doesn’t matter, _you_ matter, Nick’.  
  
He comes nowhere close to saying that. Words wouldn’t change anything, anyway.  
  
My furious driving slows into something safer. I glance at my passenger, who is still staring down. “In the glovebox, there’s a-- one of my psychopathic early indicators. Bootleg recording,” I say in a stranger’s tone. A faltering, grief-stricken stranger. “I think I-- I think I labelled it ‘Elegie’, though there’s actually three songs--” I cut myself off as Holden holds the cassette up. I nod.  
  
He slots it in. I can’t hear the music. I’m listening to the sound of his steadying breathing. _Is he relieved that he’s going home?  Relieved to be free of me?_

 

 

When it’s played through, I make him find a legally purchased Morning album. I keep expecting Holden to talk over the dictated music choices, but he does not. Maybe he’ll talk if I let our journey lapse to silence. The album ends, and he doesn’t.  
  
Hours of driving pass are somehow fleeting when you’re dreading your destination. I find the I-81. My passenger is hundreds of miles ahead of me. Already in Quantico, I suspect. The I-66. He’s leaving it last minute to unveil his plan to get around Bill’s expectations that he’ll be in the office in a matter of hours, I tell myself.

 

  
  
I’m met with complete silence from Holden until we’re hitting outer townships. Then, in a mumble: “I’ll need to go home. Change.” Like I’m his fucking chauffeur.  
  
“Your keys are at my apartment,” I tell him. There’s a desperation there that I don’t like to hear from myself. I resolve not to speak until it becomes absolutely necessary; Holden should be the one fixing this, not me.  
  
I catch a twitching nod out of the corner of my eye. No more.

I autopilot my way home.

 

  
  
“Why did you take my keys?” Holden asks softly as I pull to the curb. “That first night?”

“I’ll go up,” I say in deliberate unacknowledgement. My apartment complex opens up on an exposed, lively enough street. My boys never go through the front door. It doesn’t matter who sees Holden and I together now. “Stay put.”  
  
“I’ve already seen the interesting parts of your apartment,” he informs me.  
  
I roll my eyes and close the car door on him. As I wait by the elevator I keep expecting to hear his even footfall approaching me, as if he’ll desperately squeeze in every last second we have together. Holden doesn’t come. I trudge through my apartment, straight to my bedroom. I find it hard to direct my eyes to the dresser where I’d proudly displayed my conquests. Beside the curated paraphernalia is a handful of coins from Holden’s pockets, a set of keys, and two flat rum and cokes sitting abandoned; mocking trophies of our unfinished encounter. I can no longer remember which drink contains the flunitrazepam, an oversight I’m always careful to avoid. In my mirror above my precious collection I see Nicholas Napier. Washed out, sickly, hardly recognisable. I avoid his eyes as I pocket the keys, pick up the two drinks. I detour on the way out to pour both down the kitchen sink. My hand strays towards the bottle of rum I’d poured them from, back when Holden Ford had seemed like a wonderfully straightforward murder. Before that bastard ruined everything. The lid is off the rum. I gulp down several mouthfuls and then rinse my mouth out with water and pop a breathmint. I’m used to showing up to work stinking of that fake tang of peppermint flavouring. Better than someone smelling the rum on the paramedic operating life-or-death medical equipment. I’d imagine Holden will put two and two together, smart as he is, figure me out. ...I doubt he’ll care enough to ask.  
  
He’s sitting in the driver’s seat with the same preoccupied expression. It’s as if he didn’t register my absence. He doesn’t ask what took me so long. If he smells the mint, or the rum, he doesn’t comment.  
  
“I know the way to my place,” he says by way of explanation to our switched positions.  
  
I nod reticently and hand over both sets of keys. I put my hand back in my pocket afterwards and take the handle of my knife like a child grasping at a safety blanket. I could invite myself inside his home and stab him several times in the privacy of his own apartment. I would get caught, of course-- my victim being some hotshot FBI agent immediately expected in at his place of employment-- but it might be worth it, to never lose Holden to Quantico and to Bill.  
  
“What was the joke?” Holden asks without looking over, and I lose concentration on a daydream I know I’m incapable of enacting. “The three-legged lamb?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You said you’d answer a question. If I called Bill.”  
  
I deflate with a long, struggling sigh. _“Really?” This is what you’re going to blow my cooperation as an interviewee on?_  
  
He turns, blinks innocent and pretty and almost attainable.  
  
“Okay. ...okay,” I mutter, sucking down recuperative air. “This farmer walks into a bar. Overalls, wheat straw between his lips, the whole kit and kaboodle. But on his wrist, he’s got a teeny tiny pink leash. And on the end of the teeny tiny leash is this three-legged lamb. He orders himself a drink, and the bartender asks him ‘What’s the deal with the three-legged lamb?’. So the farmer says, ‘I bought this lamb as a newborn. Took him into the house, gave him to my girls to look after. But I told them, right from the beginning, this animal’s name is ‘Christmas Dinner’, and it will make a lovely centerpiece for our family celebration. So, I said, you can raise it, but don’t get attached. Remember that on Christmas I will be taking ‘Christmas Dinner’ out to the woodshed and butchering it. The girls fed it from a bottle, wrapped it in blankets, let it sleep on the foot of their beds. What can you do? Girls get attached. Well, a week before Christmas we woke up to Christmas Dinner bleating at the foot of our beds. Wouldn’t leave me alone until my wife and I got out of bed, followed it. I started to smell smoke.’ Now, by this point, the entire bar is listening in wrapt,” I tell the man in my passenger seat. The little boost of rum is making me over-involved in storytelling. Holden nods in serious acknowledgement and I’m spurred onwards. “The farmer takes a sip of his drink and he continues on: ‘I followed this lamb towards the kitchen and lo-and-behold, the house was on fire. I start to head towards my girls’ room, and the roof collapsed in around us. I couldn’t get past. But that little lamb could. He ran on in, bleating away. Woke my girls up. They climbed out the window. Made it out alive thanks to this here lamb.’ And by now, there’s tears welling up in his eyes, as he’s telling his story.”  
  
Holden is wrapt. Having his full attention once more is intoxicating. What a lovely final image of Holden Ford: drawn forward if I’m exerting gravitational force upon him, mesmerized, adoring. I’ll think about him like this very often.  
  
“So,” I resume, shaking my head to dispel the horrible premonition. “So, the bartender looks down at the lamb, and at its missing leg, and says ‘ah, so it got burned up in the fire?’. But the farmer shakes his head. ‘So it broke it in the jump out the window, and you had to amputate it?’ asks another patron. And again, the farmer shakes his head. He finishes his drink, and he puts his hand down onto the head of the three-legged lamb. ‘This is the smartest, most loyal animal I have ever come across in all my years farming,’ he says passionately. ‘He saved my life, my wife’s life, and most importantly, the life of my two beautiful children. ...tell me, if you had a lamb that good, would you want to eat it all at once?”  
  
I don’t look over, but I hear a weird wheezing exhalation. Another, shuddering breath. I look over and he’s laughing, not crying. “...that’s the joke?” he asks in disbelief. But he’s smiling as he starts the car. “Am I the lamb?” he asks casually, pulling across a lane and out of the steady midday flow of traffic.  
  
I don’t dignify that with a response. I wish I’d never opened my mouth on the subject. _You’re nothing to me. Not anymore._  
  
Holden drives efficiently, and as fast as his expectedly rigorous adherence to speed limits will allow. I don’t know where he lives, so I don’t have a chance to dwell upon our last few minutes together until they’re drawn to a close. He pulls up outside a set of swanky apartments, turns the car off, looks over.  
  
“Thank you, Nick,” Holden says meaningfully. He reaches for shoulder, stops short, returns barely curled fingers into his own personal space.  
  
The gratitude is disconcerting; as far as he’s concerned, I’ve given Holden Ford his life back. What a horrible subversion of my intentions.  
  
The world has become a downwards-circling, churning drain of my expectations. It warps my vision, chokes me, drags me to depths I can’t remember suffering through before. Just like a drowning victim, I flounder mindless, silent, and unable to help myself. _Do something. Do anything. Stop him leaving._ Before I can impulsively invite myself up and commit a murder I’m not even entirely certain I want to, Holden Ford steps out of the car and strides purposefully towards his apartment.  
  
He disappears through a revolving door, into the sleek glassy facade. I wait too long, to see if he doubles back to me.  
  
He doesn’t.

 

  
  
I break every speed limit that Holden had the wherewithal to respect, as I tear back towards my own apartment. I barely see the road as I’m driving, and certainly don’t have a single recollection of the journey even as I’m pulling into my parking garage. Instead, I remember Holden squinting fascinated his way through my cassette collection as if he were instead sifting through the golden coins of a Roman horde; I remember waking up to Holden studying me as reverentially as I never managed to be in mass; I remember the way his lips still curled affectionately around my full name even as he threatened to turn me over to the authorities.  
  
What is normally peaceful solitude within my own apartment feels intolerably isolated. I left at night, so every window is swathed in thick, indigo blue curtains, fringed with the golden lace of sunlight beyond. I don’t open them, don’t turn on any lights. I go straight for the rum to drown out the quiet. Still too loud, even as I finish the bottle. I flick on my sound system-- and to my horror, resume the album I’d intended to murder Holden to. In my rush to get Wire off the player, the record slips, bounces onto the carpet. There’s a tremble in my fingers as I pick it up and inspect it for damage. _He would have let me. If I’d just done it here, that first night we met. He would have happily been mine, forever._ I hurl the record straight at the wall opposite.  
  
There’s a split second of relief at the cracking sound of destroyed vinyl. One of my favourite albums explodes into an irreparable scatter of onyx-bright shards and trilateral segments across the expanse of beige carpeting. I sway far above the fallen night sky debris.  
  
_He wanted me, that night._  
  
I find the last dregs of a gin bottle in my drinks shelf and finish it in one, then a too-warm bottle of Mateus that I bought over a year before. I drink that too, slumped in the cold on my couch. I have the TV on, some talkshow rerun that keeps me from perfect awareness of my own abandonment. In every beat break in jabbering conversation and advertisement, I hear nothing.

 

  
  
I realise, at some point, that I didn’t even consider going to a bar and picking up another boy as a stand-in for Holden Ford. I’m too drunk to, now. I get to the end of the Mateus and hunt around for something to numb me more. The flunitrazepam in my pocket ends up on the coffee table, where it looks shockingly enticing. Sedative abuse has no real appeal me as far as addictive streaks go, but unconsciousness would be preferable to my current mindset. Eventually I settle for the foul Italian liqueur I bought on a whim, that has stagnated undrinkably in my cupboard; I mix it with coke and down the bitter, cloying, mid-afternoon sleep aid.

 

  
  
I must pass out, because something startles me awake. A knock on my door. I’m immensely groggy, yet unfortunately lucid about my loss. But consequences beyond losing Holden avail themselves to me now. 

Holden Ford is back to FBI. Which means he’s back to hunting monsters like me. 

It never occurred to me that Holden would immediately send police to me. That blind faith is disturbing and oh so stupid. _He’s on shaky ground at work. What better to firm up his standing than The Arlington Boy Butcher’s head on a plate._ Holden’s clever enough to have a more acceptable version of his surveillance to tell his boss, to operate in suggestions and implications that protect him from scrutiny. And here I am, a sitting duck for the authorities--  
  
I limp dreamlike, mercifully still shod feet uncooperative over the glinting broken pieces of ‘Pink Flag’. All of the windows are a brutal drop to street level, no fire escapes I can access from within the apartment. My apartment is supposed to be a death trap, but not my own death. I try to order the strobe-like flitting of terrifying possibilities through my compromised mind. _If they don’t have a warrant, my best bet is to wait out the arrival and make a break for it._ I try to be completely fluid and silent as I sink to down a few feet from the door to ascertain how many arrivals there are. If they have a warrant, it’ll be a whole team. If they’re just asking questions, just a pair, I’d imagine. My attempt at stealth is laughable, if I were in any mood to laugh; my knees hit the flooring heavy and distinct as ceremonial Japanese drum strokes. Before I can curse myself, I’m seeing the sliver of hallway beneath my front door illuminated with the rust-toned evening that I’ve been warding from my own apartment with drawn curtains. There’s-- there’s just one set of feet. It makes no sense. Holden would have warned them that I’d be armed and dangerous.   
  
Then it makes sense.  
  
I stumble up to the door, throw it open with foolhardy hope. In the hallway stands Special Agent Ford, in his suit and tie, ordered and sensible and perfect. My vision skews in a way that has nothing to do with the amount I’ve drunk over the course of the afternoon.  
  
“So, they said--” he pauses, inhales through his nose, then gives me a relentlessly judgmental once over. His shoulders are rolled back confidently as he steps past me into my apartment. As casually as if his name were also on the lease. “...really?” he mutters, switching on a light and examining the empty liquor strewn across the bench. He hangs his jacket on a chair. For the first time I see his holster, his gun. I’ve never owned a gun, always preferred knives; In Georgia, in our repressed Catholic circles, guns were always the domain of the poor and the uncultured. I don't like the gun on Holden. The newly reinstated FBI agent picks up the drained bottle of Mateus and inspects the rounded bottle like crime scene evidence. ...I suppose anything in my apartment is theoretically crime scene evidence.  
  
_“What?”_ I ask, gravelly and defensive.  
  
“You shouldn’t drink so much,” he chides, as if he gets a say in anything I do. Special Agent Ford carries himself differently to my Holden. “I don’t know how you’ve possibly got away with the crimes you have if you compulsively drink yourself into oblivion every night,” he adds severely.  
  
“I _don’t_ drink every night,” I tell him, acutely hearing my own slurring. I run a hand through my likely entirely dishevelled hair. “I-- why are you here--”  
  
Holden blinks, and looks vaguely offended. “I was going to explain the new timeline for my murder.”  
  
“For your-- what?”  
  
He doesn’t seem to register my confusion. Perhaps he thinks I’m just too drunk to hear him. “Now in my opinion, the OPR will probably adjudicate against specifically me, which means I’ll be unemployed and nobody will be expecting to see from me-- Nick--” he says, a little testy. “If I’d known you were too inebriated to remember any pertinent information, I wouldn’t have bothered coming straight here. I imagined you’d want to know.”  
  
“I want to know,” I insist in a low tone.  
  
Tension departs from his clean-shaved jawline. Holden leans himself back against my counter, folding his arms speculatively. “If the OPR clears me, I will claim that the stress is getting to me and quit of my own volition. Pack up as if I’m moving. Change my number. Now, I have a couple of interviews I was hoping to get completed first, so we’ll work around those. We’ll do this carefully and--”  
  
I lurch towards him. My unsteady hands register the solidity of his shoulders. I don’t even hate that he’s warm right now. I relish every sensory indication that Holden Ford has really returned to me. I could kiss him now. I don’t particularly want to, but maybe I should reward him.  
  
The blue eyes are wide and reproachful. “Not now,” he tells me. “They’re expecting me at work tomorrow, it would--”  
  
“Holden,” I say, loosening my fingers to a more gentle touch. “Don’t worry. I’ll be sober when I kill you. It won’t be a spur of the moment decision. It will be meticulous. Luxurious. I want every detail of you with me forever.”  
  
His chin raises and he swallows breathlessly.  
  
“Don’t you worry,” I repeat. “I’d never waste someone like you.” Even as I say it, I worry it’s too true.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (@robokittens i hope i did u proud)


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